Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10 (Audio CD)

Wife planned a family trip over the Memorial Day weekend (in the U.S it's kinda like a start of the summer). I knew we'll be spending LOT of time driving, so I had the audio book pick out for the weekend road trip.

Since it's a day that we commemorates U.S. men and women who died while in the military service I think it's appropriate to read (whoops LISTEN to) the "Lone Survivor - The eyewitness account of operation redwing and the lost heroes of SEAL team 10" by Marcus Luttrell (Author), Patrick Robinson (Contributor).

Some review I read said the book is anti-liberal and too self-aggrandizing, too much testosterone... well if I was getting shot 100 different ways and had to watch my buddies KIA (see list below). I would give this man the respect and LET HIM TELL HIS STORY! It's Marcus's story and let it be his voice.

The book start slow with back ground on Marcus and how he became a SEAL. With great insight on SEAL training in Coronado, CA and gives you a deep appreciation for just how hard it is to become a SEAL, while the second half takes you through a harrowing battle that I couldn't stop the audio CD.

When I heard (remember this is a audio book) the SEAL decided to let the goat herders go... I was screaming Nooooo in my mini-van, my family must think I am outta my mind.

Above photo: Navy SEALs (Sea, Air, Land) operating in Afghanistan in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. From left to right: Sonar Technician -- Surface 2nd Class (SEAL) Matthew G. Axelson, 29, of Cupertino, Calif; Information Systems Technician Senior Chief (SEAL) Daniel R. Healy, 36, of Exeter, N.H.; Quartermaster 2nd Class (SEAL) James Suh, 28, of Deerfield Beach, Fla.; Hospital Corpsman Second Class (SEAL) Marcus Luttrell; Machinist Mate 2nd Class (SEAL) Eric S. Patton, 22, of Boulder City, Nev.; LT (SEAL) Michael P. Murphy, 29, of Patchogue, N.Y. With the exception of the lone survivor, Luttrell, all were killed June 28, 2005 by enemy forces while supporting Operation Redwing

photo can be found http://www.globalsecurity.org Top view give some idea on surrounding where it goes down, sorry no google "streetview"

We owed a debt of gratitude from a nation who remains free because of their sacrifice. The book is a great read, but if you prefer to found out more on the news (2005) just google to found other online article.

On June 28, 2005, three of four SEALS on the ground (Murphy, Dietz, Axelson) were killed during combat operations in support of Operation Red Wing. On the same day, a QRF of eight Navy SEALs and 8 Army Night Stalkers were also killed when the MH-47 helicopter that they were aboard was shot down by enemy fire in the vicinity of Asadabad, Afghanistan in Kumar Province.

Navy SEALs
SEAL Delivery Vehicle Team 1, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

1. Lt. (SEAL) Michael P. Murphy, 29, of Patchogue, N.Y.
2. Sonar Technician (Surface) 2nd Class (SEAL) Matthew G. Axelson, 29, of Cupertino, Calif.
3. Machinist Mate 2nd Class (SEAL) Eric S. Patton, 22, of Boulder City, Nev.
4. Senior Chief Information Systems Technician (SEAL) Daniel R. Healy, 36, of Exeter, N.H.
5. Quartermaster 2nd Class (SEAL) James Suh, 28, of Deerfield Beach, Fla.

SEAL Delivery Vehicle Team 2, Virginia Beach, Va.

1. Gunner’s Mate 2nd Class (SEAL) Danny P. Dietz, 25, of Littleton, Colo.

SEAL Team 10, Virginia Beach, Va.

1. Chief Fire Controlman (SEAL) Jacques J. Fontan, 36, of New Orleans, La.
2. Lt. Cmdr. (SEAL) Erik S. Kristensen, 33, of San Diego, Calif.
3. Electronics Technician 1st Class (SEAL) Jeffery A. Lucas, 33, of Corbett, Ore.
4. Lt. (SEAL) Michael M. McGreevy Jr., 30, of Portville, N.Y.
5. Hospital Corpsman 1st Class (SEAL) Jeffrey S. Taylor, 30, of Midway, W.Va.

Army Night Stalkers
3rd Battalion, 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Airborne), Hunter Army Air Field, Ga.

1. Staff Sgt. Shamus O. Goare, 29, of Danville, Ohio.
2. Chief Warrant Officer Corey J. Goodnature, 35, of Clarks Grove, Minn.
3. Sgt. Kip A. Jacoby, 21, of Pompano Beach, Fla.
4. Sgt. 1st Class Marcus V. Muralles, 33, of Shelbyville, Ind.
5. Maj. Stephen C. Reich, 34, of Washington Depot, Conn.
6. Sgt. 1st Class Michael L. Russell, 31, of Stafford, Va.
7. Chief Warrant Officer Chris J. Scherkenbach, 40, of Jacksonville, Fla.

HQ Company, 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Airborne), Fort Campbell, Ky.

1. Master Sgt. James W. Ponder III, 36, of Franklin, Tenn.


You can found the above list from www.seal.navy.mil

I'll try to add more link for each name when I found them. Feel free to let me know.

http://www.navytimes.com/news/2007/06/navy_sealbook_070618w/

digital music with ogg and mp3

I have not encode (rip) any CD for a long long time, now a day you can just buy songs from Amazon mp3, iTunes. But lately I'm thinking of convert some old LP and rest of CD to digital :-)

Back in '97, I was running Windows 95 and it takes 45 minutes to rip and encode ONE song! Early days there were only few software that can correctly rip and (wave-> mp3) encode songs. Now a day there are many audio encoder software that can handle wav, ogg, mp3 ..etc. takes only 45 minutes to encode entire CD!

We'll look at two formats that I use most often. Ogg format mostly stay on my Treo 800 Smart phone, but my collection is dominant by good O'l mp3.

OGG

Ogg Vorbis is efficient and is the state of the art in audio compression technology. Used properly, recent Ogg Vorbis encoders deliver sound quality surpassing MP3 with all possible bitrates.

OggDropXPd, the aoTuV version with Aoyumi's code, the characters you see is Japanese just follow the English direction you'll be fine. Some of you need libmmd.dll for that to work: it's here, unzip and put it in your \Windows\system32\ folder.

Best quality/size ratio for Ogg Vorbis: 6 in Quality Management Mode, and here are some settings resulting in high enough quality.

MP3

seem like everyone has a option about which encode to use since I'm not audiophilia but here are a few place to readup Mp3-converter.com

To encode/decode MP3 files I recommend RazorLame, a Windows frontend for the command-line executable of L.A.M.E.. There are others out there just google for LAME.


After you decide on the format make sure to check if your software can normalize the song. This is simply a way to make the volumes of your music “normal.” You may have noticed that some of your CDs are a lot quieter than others, and this is what normalization attempts to fix. Digital audio is basically just a big stream of numbers, one after the next.

Normalization scans a digital audio file and finds the biggest number in the whole song. If the biggest number is only half as big as it possibly could be, then your song is really only half as loud as it could be, so the normalizer detects that and scales all the numbers up to make the volume “normal. Normalization can be really handy on compilation CDs where you don’t want to have to adjust the volume knob between tracks to maintain the desired volume.