Meeting Recap 11/11/2010
by lou on 22/11/10 at 10:10 pm
President JANET POWELL rang the bell and welcomed all to NFR.
The invocation was delivered by KRISTINE BALLECER, who also gave a tribute and thank you to our troops, past and present. JERRY DALE delivered the flag salute, and BOB KITTREDGE announced the visiting Rotarians and guests. Among the guests was DOYLE DANIEL’S grand-daughter MOLLY, now in sixth grade. Other Introductions followed, including Bulletin Reporter RICK QUAN, Sargeant At Arms JIM CLARK, Raffle Ticket Seller PAUL DYER, Greeter TOM GRAVES.
JANET then asked our NFR veterans to stand and give a short recollection of their military service, which they did. They included CLIFF SPEIGHT, PAUL READ, SCOTT LOWE, ROGER ANDERSON, JIM CONNELLY, MURR BARRY, PAT BRADLEY, BOB CARTER, ROD GIBSON, JERRY DALE, JEFF DALE, BILL MCGLASSEN, CHARLIE WADHAMS, and BOB KITTRIDGE. This week’s editor’s apologies for anyone who served their country and was not mentioned here.
Among the most memorable was BILL MCGLASSEN’S account, when he related the feeling that he and every man on deck felt when, upon returning from Korea, the ship with 2500 men on deck, started a cheer that rippled like a wave from bow to stern as their ship crossed under the Golden Gate Bridge.
In the Weird News of the Day, STEVE VARVIS tells us that in New Jersey, police officers made an offer for non-violent offenders to turn themselves in for lighter sentences. They were surprised when over 500 people come in who had no outstanding warrants.
Another item in the Weird News category is the announcement of a bacon-flavored soft drink. The company introducing the new beverage hopes that the new product will do better than their previous effort, turkey and gravy soda, introduced last year. Our speaker today Lieutenant Colonel Clay Garrison said he’s tried the bacon-flavored beverage, and says “it’s like drinking a ham.”
There was no Joke of the Day this week.
Today we were called on to vote for New Directors. The Committee to Nominate New Directors met and proposed the following nominees: PAT BRADLEY, ED KACZMAREK, PAUL DYER, and ROSENDO PENA. All four nominees were duly voted in by the membership, and our new directors promised a “new direction” in wherever we were going. The membership welcomed them for their many years of future service.
Announcements:
In NFR Membership news, our Membership Committee reports that we are negative six for membership so far this year. On the positive side, our efforts in identifying new prospective members have yielded over 50 names so far, with not all members reporting in yet. Hopefully this will bear fruit soon. If you have not turned in your prospective member list, please do so as soon as possible.
In the Show & Tell portion of the meeting, TOM GRAVES showed us one of the 14 new defibrillators that that will be going with the two ambulances and the fire-truck to the City of Guasave as part of NFR’s goodwill donation to them. The defibrillators were donated by American Ambulance. TOM asked for volunteers to test the new defibrillators, but got no responses.
Volunteers are needed to help to transfer these assets to San Diego for the hand-off to volunteers from the Guasave Club, who will take them the rest of the way. Sign-ups for volunteers are ongoing and target dates for the trip are being worked out, probably for sometime in January or February 2011. Word has it that TOM knows a retired fireman who will accompany the group to provide training on the equipment. Not sure how long the Mexicans will get to keep him, though.
NICK SMALDINO and Kim Smaldino, DAVE REULAND, ROGER ANDERSON and JULIE KEITGES delivered 60 new dictionaries to students in three classrooms at Ginsburg Elementary. The kids were ecstatic to get the new dictionaries. More dictionary dispensing missions are planned for the future.
SHERIAN ECKENROD announced that the upcoming Christmas Party will be on December 16th - 6 p.m. at Torninos in lieu of the daytime meeting. This is a wonderful opportunity for fellowship, so you should attend or you need to do a make-up, as this will count as a regular meeting.
BERNADETTE HANSON tells us that the problem of who will pick up and drop off Fresno High School students for Job Shadowing has been solved. CHRIS WONG secured buses to do the job of transporting the students, thus relieving NFR members of having to go through fingerprinting and background checks, or whatever stopped the program last year. This returns this wonderful program to both NFR and Fresno High students. Job Shadowing will be on January 20th, and BERNADETTE is taking sign-ups for volunteers. Students will be picking the professionals and professions they want to see up close, so sign up and represent your honored profession.
Community Service - Deliver turkeys - ERIC?
ERIC MAYU reports that he will need volunteers to deliver turkeys at Lowell Elementary and Cooper Middle School on Wednesday, 11/17, starting at 9:00am. Time commitment is only 20-30 minutes for each school, so it is an easy make-up. We will be purchasing 90 Turkey’s from Costco (West Shaw). The delivery time at Lowell Middle School will be 10:45am and the delivery time at Cooper Middle School 11:45am.
This week we will be at Cooper Middle for the Rotary Mentor Lunch- the time will be from 12:00pm-12:50pm. The food will be prepared by Diccico’s instead of the Chef I called upon because she does not meet the guidelines to prepare food in Fresno Unified. We will still have a remarkable time tomorrow with the kids and we look forward to seeing you out there!! Cooper is located at 2277 W. Bellaire Way Fresno, CA 93705
ERIC also mentioned the Christmas/Holiday Party at Lowell Elementary is coming up. More on the date will follow.
There was no Biz Talk this week:
There were no fines for missing pins or for missing badges this week. There were no travelers this week either, so no traveling bells.
As far as the Raffle/Wheel of (Mis)Fortune goes, BOB CARTER got the winning raffle ticket. The winning number on the Big Spin was 88, which meant “You pay $5.00” to the pot. As a consolation, BOB got a Gift Certificate from Mimi’s.
The Program:
After the Club Business and Announcements, PRESIDENT JANET POWELL stood up to introduce our speaker for today, Lieutenant Colonel Clay Garrison, currently Commander of the Maintenance Squadron for the 144th Fighter Wing, Fresno Air National Guard.
Lieutenant Colonel Clay Garrison is a native of Madera, California, and graduated from the United States Air Force Academy in 1988 with a degree in Aeronautical Engineering. After assignments in South Carolina, South Korea, and serving as an instructor at the United States Air Force Fighter Weapons School at Nellis AF Base in Nevada, Lt. Col Garrison left active duty for the Air National Guard in July 2002, when he reported to his current assignment He is in charge of over 400 personnel responsible for the maintenance and sustainment of 22 assigned F-16 aircraft. He has also participated in two tours to Iraq, returning from his most recent tour in Jan 2009.
Lt. Col. Garrison started his talk by letting us know he would be careful to separate his opinion and military policy. He has done two deployments to Iraq in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom, at the beginning and at The Surge, President Bush’s 2007 increase in the number of American troops in order to provide security to Baghdad and Al Anbar Province.
The F-16 is a great combat aircraft and is well-suited to the assistance of ground troops. Nothing changes the dynamics of the battlefield like 2000 lbs of bombs. The role of the F-16 is to look for the unusual on the ground that the ground troops may not see. Each aircraft has 500lbs of explosives and a gun, to even the odds for ground troops. These include bombs go where you tell them to go with the help of laser guided weaponry.
The all-volunteer Air National Guard troops go in 120 day rotations. Employers have to understand this. At the 1st rotation, employers were completely onboard. By the 3rd rotation in 2006, it was not so easy to get employers OK on this. Now we are in 4th rotation. It’s not just the pilots who get deployment, but every support element of the fighter wing, as well– when they travel, they take everything they need with them. It’s not unlike a professional sports team, whose mission is to win, and so they bring everything they need with them to function as a team. When the U.S. armed forces go into harms way, they go first rate.
Their purpose is to destroy enemy property and kill enemy personnel. They are very good at it, on purpose. When it comes to the technical proficiency of the pilots themselves, Lt. Col. Garrison says that when he talks to other servicemen that he meets for example in airports or hotel lobbies and they get the answer to the question “what is it that you do?”, he gets the response, “I wish I had done better in math and science in high school. “
Lt. Col. Garrison talked about The Surge in Iraq. Before The Surge, which began in January 2007, from an “environmental perspective,” Iraq was” a dangerous place to drive a Jeep”. Bad guys were getting paid $200 to fire a round at foreign troops (us), $700 for taking out a jeep and $1200 for a casualty. There were 145,000 of us there and 75% of the traffic was U.S. military vehicles on the road, 50% in town, and there was no traffic after curfew. Most flying is done at night, and the view from the air was of a dark landscape, because of the widespread black-outs.
Eighteen months is all it took to turn things around. By 12/2008 to 1/2009, The Surge had been in full effect for less than 20 months, and the landscape had completely changed. 70% of all traffic was now Iraqi commerce, and the daytime saw millions of people on the streets. The Surge brought lights to the city and the desert at night, where before all was blackness. Before The Surge, there were perhaps 140 IED (improvised explosive device) attacks per day. Afterwards, IED attacks were down to 10-15 per day.
Lt. Col. Garrison then offered his opinion on current state of affairs with U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan:
The draw down in Iraq is in progress. The less than 90,000 troops in Iraq now will go down to 50,000. Already the Air National Guard deployments to Iraq have ceased. The need for them in this theatre of operations is done.
In Afghanistan the present Air National Guard role is in surveillance and reconnaissance. Pilots and observer pairs are flying remote-controlled Predator Drones from their bases in California, Texas, North Dakota and Arizona. Only a few such are being flown daily now. The goal is to have 50 or more airborne by 2013.
What to expect next:
For Iraq, 45,000 U.S. troops will be training Iraqi military and security personnel. For the Air Force this will mean training missions for Iraq as they re-build their own air force. Special ops will be training to build core competencies in the Iraqis, which will take time. Iraq has the benefit of a highly-educated population, plus a high expectation among its people of what government should provide. They also have lots of water from the Tigris & Euphrates Rivers, and they have lots of oil to pay for re-establishing their country. And much of the infrastructure is already there–in Iraq, it was easy to disable and rehabilitate existing infrastructure, like concrete hangers and bunkers that had been originally built by Saddam Hussein’s forces.
As for Afghanistan, we’ve already been there for 7 years. No permanent facilities are being built in Afghanistan. Portable structures are everywhere, temporary housing military operations.
Afghanistan is a greater problem politically, because the expectations of the people are so dependent on tribal whims. They have bigger infrastructure problems, huge education or lack thereof, which leaves the population susceptible to influence by radical or fundamentalist religious elements. Corruption in the Afghan government is huge, probably the first of second most corrupt government in the world. The Afghanistan surge is on now, but success is up in the air.
After Lt. Col. Garrison’s program, PRESIDENT JANET presented a book to our speaker to be donated to Lowell School Library, then rang the bell to adjourn the meeting.
Recent Comments