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#but I was looking for reference photos and saw that one of mel holding her dog (a dog

mikaylacarlierose · 3 years

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Here’s what I did this weekend. Hope you all like it.

Dedicated to @jazzfordshire for writing the best fics (go read this one about Morgana & Red Daughter), and also @thesparklingblue for inspiring me to get back into my art.

Feel free to like and share, but please don’t repost without credit.

#morgana #red daughter #fan art #fic art #kayla does an art #mine #I know I made aithusa very small #but I was looking for reference photos and saw that one of mel holding her dog (a dog? not sure if it’s hers)#but then this idea just kinda took over #also... don’t mess with aithusa’s moms

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kayrosebee · 4 years

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Okay, my jpegs finally came in from BurCon last weekend💙

The concept, the first take, the retake. At first I wasn't all that happy with how it turned out. I mean, you can't see most of either of our faces(my own fault for picking a difficult pose to shoot) but the more I look at them, the happy I get. For the first take we had to stay in the pose for a bit so Chris could try and frame it, and with the retake all I can think about is when Chris was telling me I had to make my hand bigger (less heart shaped), and Misha scolding him "IT'S SUPPOSED TO BE A HEART!"

My shared Misha op with one of my best friends, Jess. This op was a chance at a "redo" from our shared Misha op from ChiCon in April (that she absolutely hates). When we got this back we both yelled about it, and she got it signed on Sunday. Needless to say, we were both happy with our "redo".

This also was taken in between my two Misha solos, and after this picture Chris told me as I started to walk away, to wait (as Jess had her solo next) because he wanted to do a retake, and Misha PUSHED her away😂

Reference photo, and the op.

My shared Ruth/Misha op with another best friend, Mel. This was her first con, and the first time she saw Misha, so this op was a lot for her. But I'm so happy with how it turned out, everyone looks sassy as fuck, and it's a good nod to the pic I used as reference. Also, LOOK HOW CUTE RUTH IS!!!

My Misha/Alex op! They're so cute with their matching colors. I was going to just do a squish hug, but this popped in my head while waiting in line and I couldn't pass it up💙 the J2M photo from the magazine was the idea, though I just told them "can you make the heart" and they knew😂

So this op is actually after my solo Cas op, but that one is saved for last with reason. This op was a hot mess (as you can see by the extreme crookedness of his flower crown)- Cas putting his coat back on, me trying to throw on my flannel quickly and getting tangled in it, Mel forgetting where she was supposed to be standing, and me running around everyone to get into my spot. Jess, Mel and I are our own version of TFW- so we HAD to have a TFW op with Cas. OP referenced was the J2M with Kathryn Newton.

You may or may not recognize @winchester-reload 's art as my reference (which was NOT shown to Misha, just used as my own personal reference). But the idea popped in my head one night a couple months back while trying to think of ideas for the op, and it wouldn't leave my mind. So I went ahead and bought the mugs(💙), boxer shorts [they're blue and green, fyi, you just can't see them because I am short and the trenchcoat is big], socks (THEY'RE THE "SEND NOODS" ONES DEAN WORE! [you can see them better in the TFW+Cas op]), piggy slippers (a nod to Mel's dcbb that I beta read -posting Nov 12!!), and I already owned the Led Zeppelin tank.

So I walk up to Cas and hand him the flower crown (as I have in all my Cas ops), I have the mugs in my hand and look up to him and I ask [Mind you I'm in a tank top, boxers, socks and slippers with a little "robe"- for some self preservation] "Can I wear your trenchcoat?" (With the biggest puppy eyes I can muster) He looks down at me (again, I am short) [he may have quirked an eyebrow, but I can't 100% recall] and then proceeds to take the coat off. One of the helpers comes over and takes the mugs from me, and Cas holds the coat open and HELPS ME GET INTO IT. Now my brain has completely melted. The helper comes back over and hands me both mugs, I hand him one and make sure he's holding it so the sun faces out, I put mine in the correct hand, and ask him to hold hands. I look up, and last minute make the "dimples of discontent" face.

Everything after that is a blur (immediately after this op we did the TFW+Cas op) but I know I thanked him. I hope I apologized, too, but who knows *shrug* hahahahahahah

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justforbooks · 5 years

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Franco Zeffirelli dies at 96

Franco Zeffirelli, the Italian director and designer who reigned in theater, film and opera as the unrivaled master of grandeur, orchestrating the youthful 1968 movie version of “Romeo and Juliet” and transporting operagoers to Parisian rooftops and the pyramids of Egypt in productions widely regarded as classics, died June 15 at his home in Rome. He was 96.

A son, Luciano, confirmed the death to the Associated Press but did not cite a cause.

Mr. Zeffirelli — a self-proclaimed “flag-bearer of the crusade against boredom, bad taste and stupidity in the theater” — was a defining presence in the arts since the 1950s. In his view, less was not more. “More is fine,” a collaborator recalled Mr. Zeffirelli saying, and as a set designer, he delivered more gilt, more brocade and more grandiosity than many theater patrons expected to find on a single stage.

“A spectacle,” Mr. Zeffirelli once told the New York Times, “is a good investment.”

From his earliest days, he seemed to belong to the opera. Born in Italy to a married woman and her lover, he received neither parent’s surname. His mother dubbed him “Zeffiretti,” an Italian word that means “little breezes” and that arises in Mozart’s opera “Idomeneo,” in the aria “Zeffiretti lusinghieri.” An official mistakenly recorded the name as “Zeffirelli.”

Mr. Zeffirelli grew up mainly in Florence, amid the city’s Renaissance riches, and trained as an artist before being pulled into theater and then film by an early and influential mentor, Luchino Visconti. Mr. Zeffirelli matured into a sought-after director in his own right, staging works in Milan, London and New York City, where he became a mainstay of the Metropolitan Opera.

His first major work as a film director was “The Taming of the Shrew” (1967), a screen adaptation of Shakespeare’s comedy, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. But Mr. Zeffirelli was best known for the Shakespearean adaptation released the next year — “Romeo and Juliet,” starring Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey in the title roles.

He reportedly reviewed the work of hundreds of young actors before selecting his two stars, both of whom were still in their teens. With a lush soundtrack by Nino Rota, and with its equally lush visuals, the film won the Academy Award for best cinematography and was a runaway box office success. Film critic Roger Ebert declared it “the most exciting film of Shakespeare ever made.”

It “is the first production of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ I am familiar with in which the romance is taken seriously,” Ebert wrote. “Always before, we have had actors in their 20s or 30s or even older, reciting Shakespeare’s speeches to each other as if it were the words that mattered. They do not, as anyone who has proposed marriage will agree.”

In the opera, an art form already known for its opulence, big voices and bigger personalities, Mr. Zeffirelli permitted himself to be deterred by neither physical nor financial constraints. “Opera audiences demand the spectacular,” he told the Times.

Mr. Zeffirelli had notable artistic relationships with two of the most celebrated sopranos of the 20th century, Maria Callas and Joan Sutherland. But certain Zeffirelli sets seemed to excite the opera world even more than the performers who sang upon them.

One such example was his production of Puccini’s “La Boheme,” an extravaganza set in 19th-century Paris and famous for its exuberant street scene and magical snowfall. After its 1981 premiere at the Met, it was said that the audience lavished on Mr. Zeffirelli a grander ovation than the one reserved for conductor James Levine and the singers who played the opera’s bohemian lovers.

“For the first time,” Mr. Zeffirelli told the Times, “audiences will have a sense of the immensity of Paris, and the smallness of this little group’s place — the actual space of a garret. The acting is now intimate and conversational, which is exactly what Puccini wanted. Since the garret is raised, every whisper and gesture will come across clearly in the theater.”

His production of Verdi’s “Aida,” performed at Milan’s La Scala in 1963 with soprano Leontyne Price and tenor Carlo Bergonzi, featured 600 singers and dancers (including scantily clad belly dancers), 10 horses, towering idols, palm trees and sphinxes littering the expanse of the stage. “I have tried to give the public the best that Cecil B. DeMille could offer,” Mr. Zeffirelli told Time magazine, referring to the Hollywood director’s biblical epics, “but in good taste.”

It was sometimes said that Mr. Zeffirelli was beloved by everyone except music reviewers, some of whom disparaged his style as excessive to the point of taking attention away from the music. Writing in the Times, Bernard Holland panned Mr. Zeffirelli’s set for Puccini’s “Turandot,” set in China, as “acres of white paint and gold leaf topped by the gaudiest of pagodas” and quipped that “if the gods eat dim sum, they certainly do it in a place like this.”

In time, the Metropolitan Opera replaced some of Mr. Zeffirelli’s productions, although the modernistic newcomers — notably Luc Bondy’s dreary “Tosca” in 2009 — did not always prove as popular.

“It’s like somebody decides that the Sistine Chapel is out of fashion,” Mr. Zeffirelli told the Times. “They go there and make something a la Warhol. . . . You don’t like it? O.K., fine, but let’s have it for future generations.”

As for those who had criticized his direction of “Romeo and Juliet” for similar reasons, he retorted, “In all honesty, I don’t believe that millions of young people throughout the world wept over my film ... just because the costumes were splendid.”

Mr. Zeffirelli was born in Florence on Feb. 12, 1923. His father, Ottorino Corsi, was a Florentine businessman, and his mother, Alaide Garosi, was a fashion designer. Her husband was a lawyer, and he died before Mr. Zeffirelli was born.

His mother continued a fraught relationship with Corsi, once attempting to stab him with a hat pin. “The opera? My destiny?” Mr. Zeffirelli observed in a 1986 autobiography, “Zeffirelli.” “I think there is a case to be made.”

After the death of his mother when he was 6, he became the charge of an aunt. He recalled his upbringing in the 1930s in the semi-autobiographical film “Tea With Mussolini” (1999), which he directed and which starred Maggie Smith, Judi Dench and Joan Plowright as English expatriates in Florence who take in a parentless child during the era of fascist rule.

Mr. Zeffirelli attended art school before studying architecture at the University of Florence. His studies were put on hold during World War II, when he fought alongside antifascist partisans. His interests shifted more toward film, particularly after he saw Laurence Olivier star in the 1944 Technicolor film adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Henry V,” which Olivier also directed.

“The lights went down and that glorious film began,” Mr. Zeffirelli recalled in his memoir. “I knew then what I was going to do. Architecture was not for me; it had to be the stage.”

He met Visconti while working in Florence as a stagehand. Visconti, with whom he lived for a period, gave him his push into professional work, hiring him to work as a designer for an Italian stage production of Tennessee Williams’s “A Streetcar Named Desire” in 1949.

Mr. Zeffirelli soon began designing and directing at La Scala and later the Met. He designed, directed and adapted from Shakespeare the libretto for the production of Samuel Barber’s “Antony and Cleopatra” that opened the Met’s new opera house at Lincoln Center in 1966.

Mr. Zeffirelli said he found it invigorating to shift from one art form to another. His theatrical productions starred top-flight actors including Albert Finney and Anna Magnani. On television, he directed “Jesus of Nazareth,” an acclaimed 1977 miniseries with a reported price tag of $18 million and a cast that included Robert Powell as Jesus, Hussey as the Virgin Mary, Olivier as Nicodemus, Anne Bancroft as Mary Magdalene and James Earl Jones as Balthazar.

Mr. Zeffirelli received a best director Oscar nomination for “Romeo and Juliet.” (He lost to Carol Reed for the musical “Oliver!”) He also garnered a nomination for best art direction for his 1982 film adaptation of Verdi’s opera “La Traviata,” starring Teresa Stratas and Plácido Domingo, one of several such operatic film adaptations he made.

His other notable films included “Hamlet” (1990) starring Mel Gibson and Glenn Close. Less acclaimed was “Endless Love” (1981), starring Brooke Shields and Martin Hewitt in a tragic story of teen romance, which Mr. Zeffirelli admitted was “wretched.”

Politically, Mr. Zeffirelli positioned himself on the right, serving as a senator in the political party Forza Italia. “I have found it an irritating irony that those who espouse populist political views often want art to be ‘difficult,’ ” he wrote in his memoir. “Yet I, who favor the Right in our democracy, believe passionately in a broad culture made accessible to as many as possible.”

He described himself as homosexual, preferring not to use the word “gay.” In 2000, he adopted two adult sons, Pippo and Luciano, both former lovers, according to the newspaper the Australian. A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.

Looking back on his life and career, Mr. Zeffirelli once told The Washington Post that he was struck by “how much is risked to become something” — “to make something of his life,” he continued, speaking of himself in the third person. To show that “he’s not a bastard.”

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at http://justforbooks.tumblr.com

#JUST FOR BOOKS #IN MEMORIAM #Franco Zeffirelli

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deztinywarriors · 6 years

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ES Spectre 2.0 Chapter 10-4

#Playchoices #pixelberry #Endless Summer #ES #fanfic

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ethelbertpaul444-blog · 6 years

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The Untold Story of Robert Mueller’s Time in Combat

One day in the summer of 1969, a young Marine lieutenant listed Bob Mueller arrived in Hawaii for a rendezvous with his wife, Ann. She was hovering in from the Eastern coast with the couple’s babe daughter, Cynthia, a child Mueller had never fulfilled. Mueller had made a plane from Vietnam. After nine months at war, he was finally due for a few short daylights of R& R outside the battle zone. Mueller had seen intense action since he last replied goodbye to his wife. He’d received the Bronze Star with a distinction for spirit for his actions in one combat, and he’d been airlifted out of the jungle during another firefight after being killed in the thigh. He and Ann had told only twice since he’d left for South Vietnam. Despite all that, Mueller admitted to her in Hawaii that he was thinking of increasing 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 has become a Marine wife for much longer. It was standard practice for Marines to be rotated out of duel, and later that time Mueller determined himself to be given to a table undertaking 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 institution with the goal of dishing his country as a prosecutor. He went on to hold high positions in five presidential administrations. He produced 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 administrator since J. Edgar Hoover. And yet, throughout his five-decade vocation, that time of duel experience with the Marines has tower huge in Mueller’s mind. “I’m most proud the Marines Corps deemed me are worth heading other Navals, ” he told me in a 2009 interview. June 2018. Subscribe to WIRED. Illustration by Jules Julien; Source Photo: Gerald Herbert/ AP Today, the face-off between Special Counsel Robert Mueller and President Donald Trump stands out, amid the pitch-black humor of Trump’s Washington, as an epic fiction of differing American nobilities: a fib of two men–born really two years apart, raised in similar affluent backgrounds in Northeastern cities, both deeply influenced by their leaders, both wizard prep school players, both Ivy League educated–who now find themselves frisking most varied roles in a riveting national theatre about political corrupt practices and Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. The two men have lived their lives in pursuit of virtually diametrically opposed goals–Mueller a life of patrician public service, Trump a life of private profit. Those diverging routes beginning with Vietnam, the conflict that cried the country apart just as both men graduated from college in the 1960 s. Despite having been developed at an nobility private armed academy, Donald Trump famously attracted five sketch deferments, including information for bone stimulant in his paws. He would later joke, frequently, that his success at forestalling genital herpes while dating several women in the 1980 s was “my personal Vietnam. I feel like a great and very brave soldier.” Mueller, for his part , is not simply volunteered for the Marines, he spent a year waiting for an injured knee to regenerate so he could act. And he has said little about his time in Vietnam over the years. When he was preceding the FBI through the disasters of 9/11 and its aftermath, he would brush off the crush stress, pronouncing, “I’m getting a lot more sleep now than I ever did in Vietnam.” One of the only other periods his staff at the FBI ever heard him mention his Marine service was on a flight residence from an official international junket. They were watching We Were Soldiers , a 2002 film starring Mel Gibson about some of the early clashes in Vietnam. Mueller gazed at the screen and saw, “Pretty accurate.” His reticence is not rare for the generation that served on the front line of a campaign that the two countries never actually embraced. Many of the veterans I spoke with for this story said they’d evaded speak about Vietnam until very recently. Joel Burgos, who served as a corporal with Mueller, told me at the end of our hour-long speech, “I’ve never told anyone most of this.” Yet for almost all of them–Mueller included–Vietnam observed the primary formative experience of their lives. Practically 50 year later, countless Marine ex-servicemen 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 firstly fronted large-scale combat in December 1968. The Marines and Vietnam instilled in Mueller a sense of restraint and a relentlessness that have driven him ever since. He once told me that one of the things the Marine taught him was to determine his plot every day. I’d written a work about his time at the FBI and was by then very well known his severe, straitlaced demeanor, so I giggled at the time and pronounced, “That’s the least surprising situation I’ve ever learned about you.” But Mueller persisted: It was an important small-time daily gesture epitomizing follow-through and hanging. “Once you think about it–do it, ” he told me. “I’ve ever became my bunk and I’ve ever scraped, even in Vietnam in the jungle. You’ve positioned money in the bank in terms of discipline.” Mueller’s onetime Princeton classmate and FBI chief of staff W. Lee Rawls withdrew how Mueller’s Marine leadership style carried through to the FBI, where he had little perseverance for subjects who interviewed his decisions. He expected his line-ups to be executed in the Hoover building just as they had been on the battleground. In finds with subjects, Mueller had a dres of quoting Gene Hackman’s gruff Navy submarine captain in the 1995 Cold War thriller Crimson Tide : “We’re now to perpetuate republic , not to practice it.” Related Stories Andy Greenberg The White House Warns on Russian Router Hacking, But Muddles the Message Garrett M. Graff A Guide to Russia’s High Tech Tool Box for Subverting US Democracy Garrett M. Graff Robert Mueller Likely Knows How This All Ends Discipline must really been a defining aspect of Mueller’s Russia investigation. In a government era of extreme TMI–marked by rampant White House seeps, Twitter outbursts, and an administration that disgorges jilted cabinet-level officials as rapidly as it can appoint new ones–the special counsel’s part has been a fastened entrance. Mueller has remained an serene cypher: the stoic, speechless representation at the centre of America’s government gyre. Not once has he expressed publicly about the Russia investigation since he took the job in May 2017, and his carefully picked squad of prosecutors and FBI negotiators has proved leakproof, even under the most intense of media spotlights. Mueller’s spokesperson, Peter Carr, on lend from the Justice Department, has generally had one thing to tell a media horde devouring for informed of 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 gait of indictments, stoppages, and law tactics coming out of his office. His investigation is proceeding on several breasts. He is excavating into Russian report functionings carried out on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media platforms. In February his office impeached 13 people and three entities connected to the Internet Research Agency, the Russian organization that allegedly masterminded awareness-raising campaigns. He’s too following those responsible for cyber interferences, includes the hacking of the email system at the Democratic National Committee. At the same time, Mueller’s researchers are probing the business dealings of Trump and his associates, great efforts that has furnished arraignments for tax fraud and plot against Trump’s former safarus chair, Paul Manafort, and a guilty plea on business fraud and lying to researchers by Manafort’s deputy, Rick Gates. The squad is also looking into the countless bilateral relations between Trump’s people and Kremlin-connected chassis. And Mueller is questioning evidences in an effort to establish whether Trump has inhibited justice by actually attempting to squelch the investigation itself. Almost each week wreaks a amaze developed as police investigations. But until the next accusation or seize, it’s difficult to say what Mueller knows, or what he thinks. Before he grew special admonish, Mueller freely and repeatedly told me that his attires of brain and person is very much influenced by his time in Vietnam, a interval “hes also” the least explored section of his biography. This first in-depth history of his time at war is based on several 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 accounts, official notes of Marine involvements, and the first-ever interrogations with eight Navals who served alongside Mueller in 1968 and 1969. They cater the best new window we have into the mind of the man conducting the Russia investigation. Mueller volunteered for the Marine in 1966, right after move away from Princeton. By late 1968 he was a lieutenant passing a action squad in Vietnam. Dan Winters; Archival Photo Courtesy of National Archives 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 commanded a Navy submarine-chaser in World War II; he expected his children to abide by a strict moral code. “A lie was the worst blasphemy, ” Mueller remarks. “The one thing you didn’t do was to give anything less than the truth to my mother and father.” He accompanied St. Paul’s prep school in Concord, New Hampshire, where the all-boys classifies accentuated Episcopal principles of modesty and manliness. He was a ace on the lacrosse force and played hockey with future US senator John Kerry on the school unit. For college he choice his father’s alma mater, Princeton, and entered the class of 1966. The expanding war in Vietnam was a frequent topic of discussion among the elite students, who spoke of the war–echoing earlier generations–in terms of duty and service. “Princeton from ’6 2 to ’6 6 was a completely different life than ’6 7 onwards, ” supposed Rawls, a lifelong friend of Mueller’s. “The anti-Vietnam push was not on us yet. A year or two subsequently, the campus was transformed.” On the lacrosse province, Mueller matched David Hackett, a classmate and jock who would profoundly affect Mueller’s life. Hackett had already enlisted in the Marines’ version of ROTC, expending his Princeton times training for the escalating campaign. “I had one of the finest role model I could have asked for in an upperclassman by the epithet of David Hackett, ” Mueller recalled in a 2013 pronunciation as FBI director. “David was on our 1965 lacrosse team. He was not undoubtedly the best on the team, but he was a identified and a natural leader.” After he graduated in 1965, Hackett embarked training to be a Marine, giving top reputations in his officer nominee class. After that he carried out to Vietnam. In Mueller’s seeings, Hackett was a shining example. Mueller “ve decided that” when he graduated the subsequent year, he too would recruit 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 armies “whos” burning 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 set the source of the incoming burn and charged 30 grounds across open soil to an American machine gun team to tell them where to shoot. Times later, as he was moving to facilitate direct a neighboring team whose captain had been wounded, he was killed by a sniper. Posthumously apportioned the Silver Star, Hackett’s commendation explained that he died “while pressing the abuse 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 information merely enhanced his resolve to become an infantry policeman. “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 attended in him the person or persons we wanted to be, even before his death. He was a lead and a role model on their areas of Princeton. He was a ruler and a role model on the fields of engagement as well. And a number of his pals and teammates joined the Marine Corps because of him, as did I.” In mid-1 966, Mueller underwent his armed physical at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard; this was before the preparation of the proposed programme gamble began and before Vietnam became a divisive cultural watershed. He echoes sitting in the waiting room as another nominee, a buckling 6-foot, 280 -pound lineman for the Philadelphia Eagles, was regulated 4-F–medically unfit for military service. After that this organization is Mueller’s turn to be rejected: His years of intense sportings, including hockey and lacrosse, had left him with an injured knee. The military announced that it had a duty 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 gave a master’s degree in international relations at New York University. Once his knee had regenerated, Mueller went back to the military physicians. In 1967 — just before Donald Trump received his own medical deferment for heel spurs–Mueller started Officer Candidate School at Quantico, Virginia. For high school, Mueller attended St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire. As a senior in 1962, Mueller (# 12) dallied on the hockey team with future US senator John Kerry (# 18 ). Dan Winters; Archival Photo by Rick Friedman/ Getty Images Like Hackett before him, Mueller was a star in his Officer Candidate School discipline class. “He was a cut above, ” recollects Phil Kellogg, who had followed one of his frat friends into the Navals after graduating from the College of Santa Fe in New Mexico. Kellogg, who went through schooling with Mueller, recollects Mueller scooting another campaigner on an obstacle course–and suffer. It’s the only period he can remember Mueller being bested. “He was a natural jock and natural student, ” Kellogg does. “I don’t think he had a hard date at OCS, to be honest.” There was, it turned out, exclusively one thing he was bad at–and it was a flunking that would become familiar to legions of his subordinates in the decades to succeed: 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 significantly. The vicious Tet Offensive–a series of arranged, widespread, surprise attack across South Vietnam by the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese in January 1968 — stupefied America, and with public opinion souring on existing conflicts, Lyndon Johnson said he wouldn’t run for reelection. As Mueller’s improving class graduated, Walter Cronkite proclaimed on the CBS Evening News that the fighting could not be earned. “For it seems now more particular than ever, ” Cronkite told his billions of onlookers on February 27, 1968, “that the vicious ordeal 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. Municipalities erupted in rampages. Antiwar dissents feelings. But the shifting tide of public opinion and civil unrest just registered with the patrolman campaigners in Mueller’s class. “I don’t retain anyone having anxieties 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 duty: He was to attend the US Army’s Ranger School. Arriving in Vietnam, Mueller was well trained, but he was also afraid. “You were scared to death of the unknown, ” he mentions. “More afraid in some ways of omission than death.” Mueller knew that simply the best young men went on to Ranger training, a strenuous eight-week advanced the competences and lead planned for the military’s society at Fort Benning, Georgia. He would be spend weeks practising patrol tactics, homicide goals, assault approaches, and attacks staged in submerges. But the aftermath of the duty were also sobering to the newly minted detective: Many Marines who progressed such courses were designated as “recon Marines” in Vietnam, a chore that are typically moved with a life expectancy measured in weeks. Mueller approvals the training he received at Ranger School for his existence in Vietnam. The coaches there had been through forest combat themselves, and their fibs from the front line schooled the candidates how to avoid several mistakes. Ranger trainees often had to function on time two hours of respite a nighttime and a single daily banquet. “Ranger School more than anything learns you about how you react with no sleep and nothing to gobble, ” Mueller told me. “You hear who you require on spot, and who you don’t want anywhere near point.” After Ranger School, he also accompanied Airborne School, aka jumping clas, where he learned to be a parachutist. By the autumn of 1968, he was on his action to Asia. He boarded a flight from Travis Air Force Base in California to an embarkation item in Okinawa, Japan, where there was an approximately tangible current of dread among the distributing troops. From Okinawa, Mueller headed to Dong Ha Combat Base near the so-called demilitarized zone–the dividing line between North and South Vietnam, launched after the collapse of the French colonial regiman in 1954. Mueller was determined and well trained, but he was also afraid. “You were scared to death of the unknown, ” he articulates. “More afraid in some ways of default than extinction, more afraid of being found wanting.” That kind of nervousnes, he announces “animates your unconscious.” For American corps, 1 968 was the deadliest time of the crusade, as they beat back the Tet Offensive and opposed the combat of Hue. All told, 16,592 Americans were killed that year–roughly 30 percent of total US fatalities in the fighting. Over the course of the conflict, more than 58,000 Americans succumbed, 300,000 were wounded, and some two million South and North Vietnamese died. Just 18 months after David Hackett was felled by a sniper, Mueller was being sent to the same part 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 contingent that traced its parentages back to the 1930 s. The regiment had been fighting almost nonstop in Vietnam since May 1965, making the nickname the Magnificent Bastards. The grueling action made its fee. In the precipitate of 1967, six weeks of duel reduced the battalion’s 952 Marine to just 300 is suitable for duty. During the Tet Offensive, the 2nd Battalion had received acrimonious and bloody battle that never let up. In April 1968, it campaigned in the fight of Dai Do, a days-long booking that killed virtually 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, affiliated the depleted legion just after Dai Do. “Hotel Company and all of 2/4 was devastated, ” he reads. “They were a skeleton gang. They were haggard, they were pummel to fatality. It was just pitiful.” By the time Mueller was set to arrive 6 months later, the human rights unit had rehabilitated its grades as its wounded Marines recovered and filtered back into the field; they had been experimented and surfaced stronger. By co-occurrence, Mueller was to inherit leadership of a Hotel Company platoon from his acquaintance Kellogg. “Those kids that I had and Bob had, half of them were ex-servicemen of Dai Do, ” Kellogg speaks. “They were field-sharp.” A corpsman of Company H facilitates a wounded Leatherneck of 2nd Battalion, 4th Marines, during Operation Saline II in the Quang Tri Province of Vietnam in 1968. Dan Winters; Archival Photo Courtesy of National Archives Second Lieutenant Mueller, 2 4 years and 3 months old, joined the regiment in November 1968, one of 10 brand-new officers assigned to the unit that month. He knew he was arriving at the so-called pointy mission of the American impale. Some 2.7 million US troops served in Vietnam, but the great majority of fatalities were suffered by those who defended in “maneuver battalions” like Mueller’s. The conflict along the demilitarized zone was far different than “its been” elsewhere in Vietnam; the primary antagonist was the North Vietnamese army , not the infamous Viet Cong guerrillas. North Vietnamese armies generally operated in bigger units, become better studied, and were more likely to engage in maintained fighting rather than melting apart after placing an waylay. “We pushed 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 get off apache helicopters in the midst of a rainstorm, wearing a raincoat–a telltale sign that he was new to the crusade. “You figured out somewhat fast it didn’t help to wear a raincoat in Vietnam, ” Sparks answers. “The humidity time compressed for the purposes of the raincoat–you were just as humid as you were without it.” As Mueller marched up from the operations 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 chortled, ” Kellogg alleges. “We started joking.” On Mueller’s first night in the field, his brand-new tent was destroyed by the wind. “That thing evaporated into thin breeze, ” Sparks suggests. He didn’t even get at spend one night.” Over the coming days, Kellogg progressed along some of his wise from the field and interpreted the procedures for calling in artillery and air strikes. “Don’t be John Wayne, ” he said. “It’s not a movie. Navals tell you something’s up, listen to them.” “The lieutenants who didn’t rely 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 teach together in the US, deploys together for a placed sum of term, and return home together. But in Vietnam, rotations began–and ended–piecemeal, driven by the vagaries of harms, illness, and individual action tours. That made Mueller acquired a legion that mingled combat-experienced ex-servicemen and relative newbies. A platoon consisted of approximately 40 Navals, generally led by a lieutenant and divided into three crews, each was presided over 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 operated the show–and could stimulate or undermine a new patrolman. “You land, and you’re at the pity of your staff sergeant and your radioman, ” Mueller says. Marines in the field knew to be dubious of brand-new young second lieutenants like Mueller. They were scoffed as Gold Brickers, after the single amber saloon that signified their rank. “They might have had a college education, but they sure as hell didn’t have common sense, ” suggests Colin Campbell, who was on Hotel Company’s mortar squad. Mueller knew his guys panicked he might be incompetent or worse. “The platoon was stupefied, ” he remembers. “They wondered whether the brand-new light-green lieutenant was going to jeopardize “peoples lives” to boost his own career.” Mueller himself was evenly terrified of acquiring land command. As he settled in, talk spread about the strange brand-new platoon commander who had gone to both Princeton and Army Ranger School. “Word was out real fast–Ivy League guy from an affluent clas. That set off fears. The affluent chaps didn’t go to Vietnam then–and they certainly didn’t finish up in a rifle team, ” announces 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 territory spats before the International Court of Justice, as Mueller had. Most were from rural America, and few had any formal education past senior 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 Engine mill in his home mood of Ohio, then attached 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 merely four months from a neighbor of his from Silver Spring, Maryland, had been killed at Khe Sanh–and had heard heavy combat much of the year. He’d beset 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 squad chairwoman was no Gold Bricker. “He wanted to know as much as he had been able to as fast as he could about the terrain, what we did, the waylays, everything, ” Maranto says. “He was all about members of the mission, the mission, the mission.” Second Battalion’s mission, as it turned out, was straightforward: Probe and destroy. “We stayed out in the bush, out in the mountains, precisely below DMZ, 24 hours a day, ” David Harris pronounces. “We was exactly enticement. It was the same meeting: They’d touched us, we’d stumbled 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 dehydrated blood on it. “We were always low on servicemen, ” Colin Campbell says. Mueller’s unit was constantly on patrol; the battalion’s preserves described it as “nomadic.” Its undertaking was to keep the foe off-kilter and disrupt their supplying words. “You’d march all day, then you’d burrow a foxhole and devote all night altering going on watch, ” announces Bill White, a Hotel Company ex-serviceman. “We were always tired, always starving, always thirsty. There were no showers.” In those first weeks, Mueller &# x27; s confidence as a captain developed as he triumphed his men’s confidence and respect. “You’d felt his nervousness, but you’d never see that in his behaviour, ” Maranto says. “He was such a professional.” The members of the platoon soon got acquainted with a better quality that would be familiar to everyone who is dealing with Mueller later as a prosecutor and FBI director. He asked a great deal and had little fortitude for malingering, but he never asked for more than he was willing to give himself. “He was a no-bullshit kind of chap, ” White recalls. Sgt. Michael Padilla( left) with Cpl. Agustin Rosario( right ), who was killed in action on December 11, 1968, during the operation at Mutter’s Ridge . div> Dan Winters; Archival Photo Courtesy of Michael Padilla Mueller’s unit began December 1968 in related silent, to protect the security for the primary military cornerstone in the field, a glorified campsite known as Vandegrift Combat Base, about 10 miles south of the DMZ. It was one of the only planned outposts nearby for Marines, a region for resupply, a rain, and red-hot food. Lance Corporal Robert W. Cromwell, who had celebrated his 20 th birthday shortly before beginning his tour of duty, entertained his compatriots with stories from his own reporting period R& R: He’d matched 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 mountain in an loathsome neighbourhood known as Mutter’s Ridge. The strategically important piece of ground, which rolled along four mountains on the countries of the south boundary 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 cistern strikes had long since denuded the bank of vegetation, but the circumventing hillsides and depressions were a forest of trees and vines. When Hotel Company touched down and fanned out from its landing zones to support a bound, Mueller was arriving to what would be his first full-scale battle. As the American contingents boosted, the North Vietnamese withdrew. “They were all drawing back to this big bunker complex, as it turned out, ” Sparks mentions. The Americans could see the signs of past combats all around them. “You’d view shrapnel openings in the trees, bullet punctures, ” Sparks says. After three days of patrols, isolated firefights with an elusive enemy, and several nighttimes of American shelling, another division in 2nd Battalion, Fox Company, received the lineup to make some high ground on Mutter’s Ridge. Even nearly 50 years later, the date of the operation abides burned into the recollections of those who pushed in it: December 11, 1968. None of Mueller &# x27; s fellow Marines had written their college thesis on African territory conflicts before the International Court of Justice, as Mueller had. That morning, after a darknes of air strikes and cannon blast “ve been meaning to” faded the antagonist, the men of Fox Company moved out at first light. The attack vanished smoothly at first; they confiscated the countries of the western portions of the crest without resistance, evading simply a handful of mortar rounds. Yet as they continued east, heavy small-arms fire started. “As they fought their practice forwards, they came into intensive and deadly fuel from bunkers and at the 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 centre of a bunker complex. “Having crusaded their nature in, the company ascertained it extremely difficult to maneuver its way out, due both to the fuel of the antagonist and the problem of carrying their wounded.” Hotel Company was on a neighboring mountain, still feeing breakfast, when Fox Company was attacked. Glint remembers that he was drinking a “Mo-Co, ” C-rations coffee with cocoa gunpowder and sugar, heated by igniting a golf-ball-sized segment of C-4 plastic explosive.( “We were ahead of Starbucks on this latte bullshit, ” he jokes .) They could hear the gunfire across the valley. “Lieutenant Mueller called,’ Saddle up, saddle up, ’” Sparks pronounces. “He called for first squad–I was the grenade launcher and had two bags of ammo buckled across my chest. I could just stand up.” Before they could even reach the antagonist, they had to fight their route through the dense cover of the depression. “We had to go down the hill and come up Foxtrot Ridge. It took hours.” “It was the only locate in the DMZ I remember meeting botany like that, ” Harris reads. “It was thick-skulled and entwining.” When the platoon lastly crested the highest level of the crest, they confronted the repugnance of the battlefield. “There were wounded parties everywhere, ” Sparks recalls. Mueller said everyone to quit their jam-packs and preparations for a fight. “We assaulted right out across the top of the crest, ” he says. It wasn’t long before the unit came under ponderous fervor from small arms, machine guns, and a grenade launcher. “There were three North Vietnamese soldiers right in front of us that rushed right up and scattered us with AK-4 7s, ” Sparks says. They reverted fervor 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, several followers went down in Mueller’s unit. Maranto remembers being impressed that his relatively lettuce lieutenant was able to stay calm while under criticize. “He’d been in-country less than a month–most of us had been in-country six, eight months, ” Maranto says. “He had remarkable equanimity, targeting fervor. It was sheer terror. They had RPGs, machine gun, mortars.” Mueller realise rapidly how much hassle the patrol was in. “That daytime was the second heaviest barrage I received in Vietnam, ” Harris mentions. “Lieutenant Mueller was guiding commerce, outlook parties and calling in air strikes. He was standing upright, moving. He probably saved our hide.” Cromwell, the lance corporal who had just become a papa, was shooting in the thigh by a. 50 -caliber bullet. When Harris encountered his wounded sidekick being hustled out of harm’s action, he was funnily relieved at first. “I discovered him and he was alive, ” Harris does. “He was on the stretcher.” Cromwell would ultimately be able to deplete some time with his wife and new child, Harris figured. “You lucky chump, ” he concluded. “You’re going home.” But Harris had miscalculated the seriousness of his friend’s harm. The missile had nicked one of Cromwell’s arteries, and he bled to demise before he reached the field hospital. The death destroyed Harris, who had sold weapons with Cromwell the darknes before–Harris had taken Cromwell’s M-1 4 rifle and Cromwell took Harris’ M-7 9 grenade launcher. “The next day when we punched the crap, they called for him, and he had to go forward, ” Harris remarks. Harris couldn’t shake the be thought 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 feelings for hours, with the North Vietnamese barrage received from the smothering jungle. “We got hit with an ambush, plain and simple, ” Harris suggests. “The brush was so thick, you had perturb hacking it with a machete. If you got 15 meters away, you couldn’t consider where you came from.” As the fighting resumed, the Marines atop the crest began to run low on quantities. “Johnny Liverman hurled me a handbag of ammo. He’d been ferrying ammo from one surface of the ridge to the other, ” Sparks withdraws. Liverman was already wounded, but he was still contend; then, during one of his runs, he came here under more shell. “He got hit right through the pate, right when I was looking at him. I get that ammo, I crawled up there and got his M-1 6 and told him I’d be back.” Sparks and the other Marine protected behind a dead tree stump, trying to find any defence amid the firestorm. “Neither of us had any ammo left, ” Sparks remembers. He slithered back to Liverman to try to expel his love. “I get him up on my shoulder, and I got shot, and I went down, ” he does. As he was lying on the dirt, he listened a shout from atop the ridge, “Who’s that down there–are they dead? ” It was Lieutenant Mueller. Sparks called back, “Sparks and Liverman.” “Hold on, ” Mueller answered, “We’re coming down to get you.” A few minutes later, Mueller seemed with another Marine, known as Slick. Mueller and Slick slipped Sparks into a missile crater with Liverman and kept a battle dress on Sparks’ wound. They waited until a helicopter gunship passed overhead, its grease-guns clattering, to amuse the North Vietnamese, and hustled back toward the top of the hill and comparative safety. An OV-1 0 criticize airplane overhead plunged smoke grenades to facilitate shield the Marines atop the ridge. Mueller, Sparks reads, then went back to retrieve the mortally wounded Liverman. The extinctions organized. 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 kill again, this time fatally. Rosario, extremely, lived waiting for a medevac helicopter. Finally, as the hours transferred, the Marines coerced the North Vietnamese to rescind. By 4:30 pm, the battlefield had hushed. As his eulogy for the Bronze Star eventually predicted, “Second Lieutenant Mueller’s courage, vigorous initiative and unwavering devotion to job at great personal gamble is also contributing in the overcome of the enemy force and were in keeping with the highest institutions of the Marine Corps and of the United States Naval Service.” As night precipitated, Hotel and Fox held the anchor, and a third busines, Golf, was brought forward as added buttres. It was a brutal era for both sides; 13 Americans vanished and 31 were wounded. “We framed a pretty good hurt on them, but not without enormous expenditure, ” Sparks suggests. “My closest pals were all killed there on Foxtrot Ridge.” As the Americans searched the field around the ridge, they weighed seven enemy dead left behind, in addition to being able to seven others killed in the course of the clash. Intelligence reports afterward revealed that the duel had killed the commander of the 1st Battalion, 27 th North Vietnamese Army Regiment, “and had practically decimated his staff.” For Mueller, the engagement had proved both to him and his gentlemen that he could lead. “The minute the shit stumbled the fan, he was there, ” Maranto says. “He performed outstandingly. After that night, there were a lot of guys who would’ve sauntered through walls for him.” That first major revelation to combat–and the loss of Marines under his command–affected Mueller deeply. “You’re standing there consider,’ Did I do everything I could? ’” he answers. Afterward, back at camp, while Mueller was still in startle, a major came up and swiped 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 follow out life guilty for fastening up.” The heavy toll of the casualties at Mutter’s Ridge shook up the whole legion. Cromwell’s death reached extremely hard; his laughter and good nature had tied the human rights unit together. “He was happy-go-lucky. He appeared after the new people when they came in, ” Bill White withdraws. 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-bitten; overcome with sorrow, he stopped scraping. Mueller tackled him, telling him to refocus on members of the mission ahead–but eventually accommodated more consolation than punish. “He could’ve applied me punishment hours, ” White announces, “but he never did.” Robert Mueller receives an honor from his regimental officer Col. Martin “Stormy” Sexton in Dong Ha, South Vietnam in 1969. Dan Winters; Archival Photo Courtesy of the place of Robert Mueller Decades later, Mueller would tell me that nothing he ever confronted in his profession was as challenging as conducting workers in duel and watching them be cut down. “You realize a great deal, and every day after is a commendation, ” he told me in 2008. The remembering of Mutter’s Ridge positioned everything, even terror investigations and showdowns with the Bush White House, into view. “A lot is going to come your behavior, but it’s not going to be the same intensity.” When Mueller ultimately did leave the FBI in 2013, he “retired” into a hectic life as a top spouse at the existing legislation house WilmerHale. He learnt some first-class in cybersecurity at Stanford, he investigated the NFL’s handling of the Ray Rice domestic violence case, and he provided as the so-called colonization captain 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 twirling blizzard start out by the firing of FBI director James Comey, and deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein wanted to know if Mueller would serve as the special counselor in the Russia investigation. The job–overseeing one of the most difficult and sensitive investigations ever undertaken by the Justice Department–may simply graded as the third-hardest of Mueller’s career, after the post-9/ 11 FBI and after resulting those Marine in Vietnam. Having accepted the job as special counselor, he retreated into his prosecutor’s bunker, cut off from the rest of America. In January 1969, after 10 epoches of rain showers and cold weather, the unit got a three-day R& R break-dance at Cua Viet, a nearby brace locate. They listened to Super Bowl III on the radio as Joe Namath and the Jet-blacks defeated the Baltimore Colts. “One touch of actuality was listening to that, ” Mueller says. In the field, they get little information about what was happening at home. In fact, later that time, while Mueller was still deployed, Neil Armstrong made his first step on the moon–an incident that people around the world watched live on Tv. Mueller wouldn’t find out until daylights afterward. “There was this whole segment of autobiography you missed, ” he says. R& R breaks is likewise rare opportunities to imbibe alcohol, though there was never often of it. Campbell says he drink just 15 brews during his 18 months in-country. “I can retain drinking warm beer–Ballantines, ” he pronounces. In tent, the three men traded publications like Playboy and mail-order automotive catalogs, dreaming the cars they are able to soup up when they returned back to Position. They guided the time toy wino or pinochle. For the most part, Mueller bounced such activities, though he was into the era’s music( Creedence Clearwater Revival was–and is–a particular favorite ). “I retain several times strolling into a bunker and feeling him in a corner with a notebook, ” Maranto says. “He read a lot, every opportunity.” Throughout the rest of the month, they patrolled, meeting little linked with the enemy, although abundance of clues of their spirit: Hotel Company often radioed into allegations of concluding descended the organizations and disguised ply caches, and they are usually made incoming mortar rounds from unseen enemies. Command under such conditions wasn’t easy; drug use is an issue, and racial hostilities guided high. “Many of the GIs were draftees; they didn’t want to be there, ” Maranto says. “When new people revolved in, they imparted what happens in the United States with them.” Mueller recalls at times struggling to get Marines to follow orders–they already felt that the beating of serving in the infantry in Vietnam was as bad as it could get. “Screw that, ” they’d reply sharply when was necessary to do something they didn’t wishes to do. “What are you going to do? Route me to Vietnam? ” Yet the Marines were bonded through the constant danger of being subjected to duel. Everyone had close calls. Everyone knew that luck in the combat area was finite, fate hurtful. “If the good Lord diverted over a placard up there, that was it, ” Mueller says. Nights particularly were fitted with horror; the enemy elevated sneak assaults, 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-4 7, right behind him. “He’d get inside our bound. He had our back, ” Campbell suggests. “Why didn’t he kill me and another chap in the foxhole? ” Campbell roared, and the infiltrator bolted. “Another Marine down the line shot him dead.” Mueller was a constant existence in the fields, regularly reviewing the code signals and passwords that marked friendly contingents to each other. “He was quiet and reserved. The plan was meticulous and detailed. He knew at night where every place was, ” Maranto recalls. “It wouldn’t be peculiar for him to come out and make sure the volley crews were correctly placed–and that you two are awake.” The souls I talked to who performed alongside Mueller, adults now in their seventies, largely had strong recollections of the kind of captain Mueller had been. But numerous didn’t know, until I told them, that the man who led their team was now the special guidance probing Russian interference in the election. “I had no idea, ” Burgos told me. “When you’ve been in action that long, you don’t remember appoints. Appearances you recollect, ” he says. Maranto says he only put two and two together recently, although he’d thought for years if that person 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 daily life, ” Maranto says. At the makeshift landing zone getting briefed before being airlifted to join the rest of the operation. Mueller is standing on the right with his back to the camera . div> Dan Winters; Archival Photo Courtesy of VJ Maranto April 1969 recognized a stark American milestone: The Vietnam War’s engagement death toll transcended the 33,629 Americans killed while campaigning in Korea. It too drew a brand-new menace to Hotel Company’s region: a laid of powerful. 50 -caliber machine gun nests that the North Vietnamese had set up to harass helicopters and low-flying airliners. Hotel Company–and the battalion’s other units–devoted much of the middle-of-the-road of the month to shooting down the lethal artilleries. Until they were found, resupply helicopters were limited, and flights were vacated when they came under direct flame. One Marine was even killed in the landing zone. Ultimately, on April 15 and 16, Hotel Company overran the enemy firearm and action a departure, uncovering 10 bunkers and three firearm positions. The next day, at around 10 am, Mueller’s platoon was attacked while on patrol. Facing small-arms ardour and grenades, they called for breath assist. An hour later four assault rolls thumped the North Vietnamese position. Five days later, on April 22, one of the 3rd Platoon’s garrisons reached under same attack–and the situation abruptly grew frantic. Glints, who had returned to Hotel Company that winter after healing from his wound at Mutter’s Ridge, was in the waylaid garrison. “We lost the machine gun, jammed up with shrapnel, and the radio, ” he recalls. “We had to pull back.” Nights especially were filled with frightful; the adversary wished sneak onslaughts, often in the hours before dawn. With radio contact lost, Mueller’s platoon was called forward as buttres. American artillery and mortars pounded the North Vietnamese as the team boosted. At one point, Mueller was engaged in a close firefight. The incoming fervour was so intense–the stress of the moment so all-consuming, the adrenaline pumping so hard–that when he was shot, Mueller didn’t instantly notice. Amid the combat, he glanced down and recognized an AK-4 7 round had overtaken clean through his thigh. Mueller prevented fighting. “Although seriously wounded during the course of its firefight, he resolutely maintained his position and, aptly guiding the volley of his squad, was instrumental in demolishing the North Vietnamese Army force, ” reads the Navy Commendation that Mueller received for his action that day. “While approaching the designated area, the team emanated under a heavy loudnes of enemy burn from its right flank. Skillfully soliciting and directing corroborating Marine artillery fire on the opponent outlooks, First Lieutenant Mueller ensured that burn superiority was gained during the hostile unit.” Two other members of Hotel Company were also wounded in the fight. One of them had his leg blown off by a grenade; it was his first day in Vietnam. Mueller’s eras in duel ended with him being lifted out by helicopter in a sling. As the aircraft peeled away, Mueller withdraws reviewing he might at least get a good dinner out of the harm on a infirmary carry, but he was delivered instead to a field hospital near Dong Ha, where “hes spent” three weeks recovering. Maranto, who was on R& R when Mueller was wounded, retains returning to camp and hearing oath that their commandant had been shot. “It could happen to any one of us, ” Maranto says. “When it has come to him, there was a lot of sadness. They experienced his company.” Mueller recovered and returned to active office in May. Since most Marine detectives spent only six months on a combat rotation–and Mueller had been in the combat zone since November–he was sent to serve at bidding 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 engagement tour accomplish, working at the Marine barracks near the Pentagon. Soon thereafter, he cast off an application to the University of Virginia’s law school. “I consider myself extraordinarily lucky to have constructed it out of Vietnam, ” Mueller announced years later in a discussion. “There were many–many–who did not. And perhaps because I did survive Vietnam, I have always experienced compelled to contribute.” Over the years, a few of his former chap Marines from Hotel Company recollected Mueller and have watched his busines unfold on the national theatre over the past two decades. Sparks cancels dining lunch on a July day in 2001 with the story on: “The TV was on behind me.’ We’re going to introduce the new FBI director, Robert … Swan … Mueller . ’ I slowly switched, and I appeared, and I belief,’ Golly, that’s Lieutenant Mueller.’” Sparks, who speaks with a thick Texas accent, says his first thought was the running gag he’d had with his former captain: “I’d always announce him’ Lieutenant Mew-ler , ’ and he’d mention,’ That’s Mul-ler . ’” More lately, his former Marine comrade Maranto says that after devoting six months in fighting with Mueller, he has watched the coverage of the special advise investigation progress and chortled at the news reports. He says he knows Mueller isn’t sweating the pressure. “I watch people on the word talking about the distractions getting to him, ” he alleges. “I don’t think so.” Garrett M. Graff ( @vermontgmg) is a lending writer at WIRED and scribe of The Threat Matrix: Inside Robert Mueller’s FBI and the War on Global Terror . He can be reached at garrett.graff @gmail. com . em> Such articles is displayed in the June issue. Subscribe now . em> Listen to this story, and other WIRED features, on the Audm app . em> More Great WIRED Stories If Trump is laundering Russian fund now &# x27; s how it would work Spot the illegal in these airport baggage x-rays How a DNA transfer virtually imprisoned an innocent being of murder PHOTO ESSAY: Ominous view Read more: https :// www.wired.com/ narration/ robert-mueller-vietnam / http://dailybuzznetwork.com/index.php/2018/07/01/the-untold-story-of-robert-muellers-time-in-combat/

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Everything wrong with the reaction to Louis C.K.’s ‘apology’

Louis C.K. on Saturday Night Live in 2017

Image: Will Heath/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images

Well, it looks like the Louis C.K. apologists have at least pivoted to a different tactic than simply labeling accusers liars, after the comedian finally admitted to the sexual misconduct he’s been disparaging as mere “rumor” for five years (and as recently as two months ago).

Within mere hours of C.K. issuing his statement, the internet fell over itself to commend him for the brave act of finally admitting he is, in fact, a sexual harasser and feels bad about it — now that there’s a New York Times story about it, anyway.

And as C.K. fans (and even some of his critics) pat him on the back for doing the literal least he could by not lying anymore, some conservatives continue to make excuses for Roy Moore, the former Alabama judge and U.S. Senate candidate accused of initiating a sexual relationship with a 14-year-old girl when he was 32.

SEE ALSO: Louis C.K. seemed like the guy who got it. Who said what we were all thinking. What a waste.

Unlike C.K., Roy (sort of) denies the damning evidence. Like C.K., however, his main strategy for dodging backlash is to claim he asked for “the permission of her mother” first. (Excuse me while I projectile vomit.)

Louis C.K. made one not-totally-god-awful PR move: His statement read: “These stories are true.” Promising start. From there, he covers his ass legally by implying a level of consent from his victims by claiming he, “never showed a woman my dick without asking first,” then he fails to apologize to his victims even once but has enough time to reference how “admired” and “looked up to” he was — four times — as a weird way of deflecting blame to his celebrity or, to an extent, his victims.

Are we really buying his redemption arc bullshit already? It hasn’t even been a day.

Are we really eating up his redemption arc already? It hasn’t even been a day.

If history tells us anything, C.K. will likely pick his career back up once we’ve forgotten about his victims. You know who doesn’t get the luxury of rebuilding their careers? The female comedians Julia Wolov, Dana Min Goodman, and Abby Schachner, who were either ostracized from the comedy community for speaking out or lost the will to keep trying after such demoralizing experiences.

SEE ALSO: The ugly truth behind Louis C.K.’s absolute worst masturbation jokes

This isn’t an anomaly: Forgiving, forgetting, and rewarding men (especially beloved auteur-types like C.K.) who do awful things to women has always been the norm. Just last year the Academy nominated both Mel Gibson, accused of domestic abuse and a host of horrible utterances, and Casey Affleck, accused of sexual harassment in a civil lawsuit that settled. Affleck won his Oscar.

Meanwhile, Winona Ryder still hasn’t fully bounced back from shoplifting in 2001. Rose McGowan’s career never recovered from the crime of accusing Harvey Weinstein of rape. But after shitting out a bunch of half-truths and confirming his sexual predation, Louis C.K.’s back to being the tell-it-like-it-is guy?

Nope. Nope. Nope.

Let’s break down everything wrong with setting the lowest possible bar for known male predators:

1. Louis C.K.’s apology is so real, he forgot to apologize

The first real and human apology I’ve read. No excuses, no blame.

— Niki (@nikicvetnich) November 10, 2017

Wow, Louis CK has been the first person (maybe in history) to offer what strikes me as an appropriate apology for sexual harassment. What do you think? https://t.co/71oFbJyd8N

— Peter Debruge (@AskDebruge) November 10, 2017

According to his apologists, claiming that he “asked first” before masturbating in front of unwilling women is just about the most no-bullshit, no-excuse apology in history! Kudos to C.K. — even though it’s hard to call a statement where you don’t say “I’m sorry” an apology. But he did take the time to put words in his victims’ mouths, trivializing the predatory nature of his acts by attributing the issue to their “admiration” of him.

Wow. So #real. So human. Historic.

2. The real perpetrators are ‘feminist comedians’ who didn’t ruin their careers to take him out!

Hey “feminists” in comedy who didn’t call out Louis CK, you used rape to grease the wheels of your career. Sweet dreams!

— Gavin McInnes (@Gavin_McInnes) November 10, 2017

Let’s turn this into a bonafide, historically accurate witch hunt by blaming women for the crimes and complicity of men! Grab your pitch forks, folks, cause the feminists can’t stop profiting from the systemic sexism that makes it damn near impossible for them to have careers in the male-dominated field of comedy!

3. Urgh can his victims shut up already? It’s getting in the way of enjoying his comedic genius.

Comedian Louis C.K is still of my favorites. He made a mistake. He admitted he was wrong. He is human. Lets move on.

— Channing (@YourBoyChanning) November 10, 2017

I mean, who among us hasn’t made the human mistake of continuously walking into work, showing your colleagues your genitals, then essentially calling them liars for years when they try to call you out for it. He’s just a person, get over it!

4. The real victim here is the masturbation jokes being taken out of context.

Comedian Louis C.K. is the funniest comedian I’ve ever heard of. Don’t take things out of context to bash him cuz ur upset. He admitted he was wrong. I will always continue to love him. If ur offended, you cant handle good comedy. He’s not a bad person. just made mistakes. http://pic.twitter.com/GrIiwa63Z7

— Light saw Ragnarok 4 times (@GodMischievous) November 10, 2017

If you don’t find men who believe it’s O.K. to masturbate in front of numerous unwilling women funny, then you just don’t understand the art of comedy. Sorry.

5. It’s not like he raped and murdered people THEN masturbated in front of them without their consent!

Jerking off. What a waste of a headline. I thought this was going to be career ending. Some women really need to stop wasting people’s time. FFS

— EccOvOwl (@EccOvOwl) November 9, 2017

Is it a crime to jerk off in front of unwilling peers over whom you hold significant power?

Yes. It is. It’s a literal crime.

6. I won’t stoop to leftist tactics of politicizing tragedies, but these Hollywood predators prove all liberals are terrible.

“Comedian Louis C.K.” Like Weinstine attacked @realDonaldTrump and now we see the truth coming out about both these rapist http://pic.twitter.com/LnCqZeVaqr

— inmatemd (@inmatemd) November 10, 2017

BREAKING:

Anti Trump comedian Louis CK apologizes for sexual misconduct.

Says allegations are true. https://t.co/BNczT5RihA http://pic.twitter.com/qTWlgoYpIz

— GRANT J. KIDNEY 🇺🇸 (@GrantJKidney) November 10, 2017

Y’all heard of the liberal, anti-Trump Alabama judge Roy Moore? Or the libtards Bill O’Reilly and Roger Ailes over at Fox News? Or — perhaps you forgot that our progressive lefty president Donald Trump is accused of sexual harassment and assault by 16 women? Liberals, amiright!

So, yes, a sexual predator finally owned up to some sexual assault allegations (kind of) — for once. But can we just agree to expect more than that from men? For example, it’d be lovely if men just stopped sexually assaulting people in general. Then we wouldn’t even have to applaud them for finally admitting to the assaults!

Sounds like a nice world, doesn’t it? We won’t hold our breath, though. Or remain silent.

WATCH: Jennifer Lawrence, Reese Witherspoon speak out about sexual harassment in Hollywood