Wednesday night reading

I am fixing to shut down and rest the brain for awhile and watch the final episode of Comanche Moon, the final installment in the Lonesome Dove series, but before I go I thought I would leave you a couple of stories to look at.
What do these people know that the mass market media doesn't?
Operation Puppy Love - Mission Complete
Sgt Hook has drafted a letter suitable for framing or mailing to the politician of your choice from those on the ground.
Only 31 days to the Daytona 500

One night he and Blasingame were talking at a diner in Herndon, Virginia, around 2 a.m. “He said, ‘I feel like a fraud,’” she recalls. “‘Here I am writing and analyzing and bitching about things, and I’m not doing anything.’” He told her he was considering joining the Army but didn’t know whether he should finish school first. “I said, ‘I’m not going to tell you what to do. Pick what you want to do and go for it, balls to the wall,’” she remembers. He enlisted.

This is the story of guy who doesn't fit the stereotype of the soldier as envisioned by Hollywood.

They knew him as the skinny shit-talker, the liberal idealist—the poet who stayed up all night listening to the Melvins, reading Philip K. Dick, and scrawling verses he’d belt out at poetry competitions. He was six feet tall and 165 jagged pounds of caffeine, Camel Lights, and sarcasm. A 22-year-old with a mop of dyed blond hair and an unkempt beard tends to stand out in the muted suburb of Reston, Virginia—a half-hour west of the nation’s capital.

Sadly he was killed while running into a building to pursue a sniper who had just shot one of his men. A booby trapped IED was waiting for him inside the doorway of the house.
Here is the whole story
I received the tip about this story from somebody, whose name I will keep private for now, who works for the magazine in which this story is published. I am always happy to pass along stories of our soldiers and what they do and what they sacrifice.