Honor

Honor
Who loses honor can lose nothing else - Latin Proverb

A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life depend on the labours of other people, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as i have received - Albert Einstein

Alsa.org – ALS USA Fighting Lou Gehrigs Disease

Alsa.org – ALS USA Fighting Lou Gehrigs Disease

Please visit http://www.alsa.org/ and click on Donate and make your tax deductible donation today.  Your help is needed, make a donation for people you know and for people you don't.  Your donation may make the difference.

Decades ago a famous baseball player became ill and gave a sad farewell to millions of fans who knew he was going to be killed by the disease that would forever forward carry his name. Lou Gehrig’s disease is a killer, and the people of Alsa.Org have established a website to educate, enlighten and push for a cure. The site is divided into sections that help people learn about the disease and the progress that researchers are making in the development of treatments. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis has been observed for over a hundred and forty years, but it was the plight of the beloved Lou Gehrig in 1939 that brought the world’s attention to the disorder. As visitors to Alsa.Org will learn, this disease is not selective in who it targets, affecting over 30,000 people per year, it has killed a great many famous people, sports figures and even one vice president of the United States.

Guest to Alsa.Org will learn all of the known facts about ALS, its symptoms, diagnosis and various forms it presents. There is complete information about genetic testing and the ALS Association that is fighting the disease. One major goal of the association is to give true hope to people who are facing this diagnosis, and helping them to live more complete and happy lives through the care and compassion that they can provide. For visitors interested in joining the fight against ALS, there are several pages of information provided, including links to donate unused gift cards, or money that will be used to support the research for a cure.

The ALS Association

secure2.convio.net

The ALS Association encourages scientific research to find a cure for ALS, heightens awareness of the nature of the disease, stimulates volunteerism and activism, and increases awareness of government leaders to encourage support of research and patient care.

Effort

Any supervisor worth their salt would rather deal with people who attempt too much that with those who try too little - Lee Iacocca

It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed. In this life we get nothing save by effort. Theodore Roosevelt

Military Heroes Fight ALS

“Right away after my diagnosis, I decided to do all I could to beat this thing,” writes Dave Ihde. “First you cry, then you decide to fight or sit around and wait to die. I decided to fight.” Ihde, 58, is a United States Air Force veteran who was diagnosed with ALS in November 2012. His response to his ALS diagnosis echoes the responses of many veterans who are facing the disease just as bravely as they faced the dangers of military service.

Veterans are approximately twice as likely to die from ALS as the general population. The reason for the disparity is unknown.

Since his diagnosis, Ihde – a self-described “jack-of-all-trades” who once provided security to B-52s loaded with nuclear warheads and later enjoyed a long career as a photographer – has lost the ability to speak.  He writes that even typing has become difficult for him. As a professional photographer, Ihde knows the power of communication and acutely feels the limits that ALS has placed on his ability to communicate. Still, he writes, “I try to spread positivity throughout to other PALS [Persons with ALS] through my writings and photos. I spread awareness to anybody who is interested because I don’t hide the disease, I flaunt it. I got this [disease]: how can you help me cure it?”

Chris Wickmark, a fellow Air Force veteran, takes a similar approach to life with ALS. “I say to my friends, ‘I’m going to tell you what I have, but you cannot feel sorry for me,’” she says. “I don’t feel bad for myself.” Wickmark, 55, lives in Idaho, where she runs a farm. Affectionately known as the “Idaho Disco Queen,” because of her love for disco music and dance, she recently danced onstage with her favorite band, The Trammps, as they played their hit “Disco Inferno (Burn Baby Burn)” during a benefit for Vietnam War veterans.

Don Farrell, 53, was diagnosed with ALS in August 2011. An Air Force veteran, Farrell says that people living with ALS need to focus on the positive, not dwell on negativity. He stresses the need for people to keep ahead of the disease by planning ahead and encourages veterans to use the resources available to them through the Veterans Administration (VA).

The devastating and progressive physical effects of ALS are experienced in many ways. Farrell, for example, must be fed via feeding tube because his swallowing muscles have been affected by the disease, and Ihde describes how he has had to give up almost everything he loves doing:

“My work, golf, playing guitar, and singing. Dancing with my wife.” He is learning side lap steel guitar because he can no longer play chords. “You have to adapt,” he adds.

Ihde, Farrell, Wickmark and other veterans living with ALS work to spread awareness about ALS every day. Ihde has worked with local, state, and federal government officials to express the need for continuous funding of programs for research, treatment, and services for people living with the disease. He recently advocated for – and helped win – funding in Pennsylvania, where he lives. He and Farrell are assisting the U.S. Department of Defense with research into ALS.

For her part, Wickmark hopes that by raising awareness about ALS, she can help achieve two main goals: first, let people know about the early symptoms of ALS; and second, raise funds for research into treatments to slow the progression of ALS or cure the disease altogether.

All three veterans encourage people diagnosed with ALS to take advantage of the support and resources offered by The ALS Association. The ALS Association is actively engaged in research to provide answers, new treatments, and one day a cure for all people living with ALS. “Our military veterans dedicated their lives to defending us,” said Jane H. Gilbert, President and CEO of The ALS Association. “We need to continue to fight for them, just as they fought for us.”

The ALS Association encourages the public to visit the Wall of Honor at www.alsa.org/advocacy/veterans to see the faces of our military heroes, read about their service, and learn about their fight against ALS. Veterans and their families are also encouraged to visit the site and share their stories.

To learn more about what you can do to join the fight against ALS, visit the “Advocate” section of The ALS Association website at www.alsa.org/advocacy.

MODDERN Cures Act Reintroduced - ALSA.org

MODDERN Cures Act Reintroduced

Ask your Representative to support today!

Rep. Leonard Lance (R-NJ) has reintroduced the MODDERN Cures Act in the House of Representatives. MODDERN Cures (H.R. 3091) is a game-changer when it comes to the search for a treatment. The legislation provides new incentives to pursue ALS drug development and will significantly increase opportunities to find a treatment for the disease. We urge you to contact your Representatives and ask them to co-sponsor the MODDERN Cures Act TODAY!

The MODDERN Cures Act would accelerate the search for a treatment for ALS and other diseases by removing the barriers that limit medical innovation and by providing incentives to develop new treatments and diagnostic tools that can improve, prolong and, ultimately, save lives. Specifically the bill will: encourage research on treatments, which have been set aside in the lab, but hold promise for treating diseases like ALS that have unmet medical needs; remove barriers and provide incentives to develop new diagnostics; and ensure timely and appropriate reimbursement for new tests and treatments so that patients have access to the latest medical technology as soon as possible. A summary of the bill is available here: 

                                                                                       

MODDERN Cures Act Summary.

                                                                      MODDERN CURES ACT

The ALS Association urges Congress to enact the MODDERN Cures Act (H.R. 3091) to accelerate the 

development of new diagnostic tools and a treatment for Lou Gehrig’s Disease. 

ALS is Always Fatal

No treatment: There currently is no effective treatment for ALS that stops, significantly slows or 

reverses the steady progression of the disease. There is no known cause, cure or means of 

prevention. The average life expectancy for a person with ALS is just two to five years from 

diagnosis and approximately half of all people with ALS will die within 14 months. 

Everyone at risk: ALS does not discriminate and can strike anyone at any time. However, military 

veterans are approximately twice as likely to die from ALS as the general public. 

No biomarkers: Biomarkers that predict or diagnose the disease or determine the efficacy of a 

treatment or proposed treatment do not currently exist for ALS. In fact, ALS is a diagnosis of 

exclusion, meaning that physicians reach an ALS diagnosis after first exhausting all other 

possibilities. These facts not only delay access to needed support services that can help improve care 

for people with ALS, but they also delay the development of treatments for the disease. Diagnostic 

tools like biomarkers can speed treatment development by predicting earlier in the development 

process whether and in whom a possible therapy may work. 

Barriers to Treatments, Barriers to Diagnostics

There are a number of significant barriers that have limited and discouraged the development of a 

treatment for ALS. These include:

Risk: It can take more than 15 years and cost over $1 billion to develop a new drug for ALS and the 

chances of successfully developing a new drug are small. About 99% of all compounds screened fail 

during development and never reach patients. This presents an enormous risk, and can discourage 

drug development especially in a rare neurological disease, like ALS, with a limited population.

Patents: Patent protection and the ability to make a treatment available without generic competition 

for a period of time helps to drive drug development and reduce risk. Indeed, patents enable 

manufacturers to recover part of the R&D costs that are necessary to pursue new treatments, 

including those that ultimately do not make it to clinical development. The Orphan Drug Act is an 

example of how patent protection can spur innovation. However, there are hundreds of thousands of 

potential treatments that either have lost patent protection, or have weak patents. These potential 

treatments that could save lives are sitting on the lab shelf and never will be developed simply 

because they lack patent protection. Moreover, the patent system can create disincentives to pursue 

treatments for diseases like ALS where the time it takes to develop a therapy can exceed 15 or more 

years. That’s because the patent clock starts at the beginning of the development process, leaving 

only a limited amount time after approval for a company to recoup its costs before the patent expires.

Regulatory challenges: There is no clear regulatory pathway for the approval of new diagnostics, 

making it difficult to predict risk and success and discouraging diagnostic development and 

personalized medicine.

Delays in coding and reimbursement: It can take a year or longer for a diagnostic to receive a 

reimbursement code. These delays not only discourage development of diagnostics, but also further 

delay patient access to vital diagnostics tools.

The Solution: the MODDERN Cures Act introduced in the House of Representatives by Congressman Leonard Lance (R-NJ), 

Addresses Unmet Medical Needs: Facilitates the Development of Treatments

MODDERN Cures would create a new category of drugs called “dormant therapies,” which are those 

that are deemed to have insufficient patent protection and also show promise for treating diseases like 

ALS for which there are limited or no treatments. The bill would encourage development of dormant 

therapies by providing a 15 year period of data exclusivity, which offers incentives for therapy 

development similar to those afforded by patent protection. However, unlike patents, the period of 

data exclusivity would begin at the time of FDA approval so that manufacturers are not penalized for 

pursuing treatments for diseases like ALS that can take 15 or more years to develop. 

For a rare disease like ALS, MODDERN Cures builds upon the Orphan Drug Act and opens new 

opportunities to find a treatment.

Removes Barriers for Developing New Diagnostics and Personalized Medicine

MODDERN Cures would ensure prompt coding and reimbursement for new diagnostic tests by 

defining improvements to the process for determining payment rates and developing a system for 

assigning temporary HCPCS codes to new tests until a permanent code is established. HCPCS codes 

are necessary to ensure reimbursement, coverage and patient access to new diagnostics.

The bill would encourage the development of companion diagnostics that accurately predict for 

whom a medicine will work by prolonging the period before which generics may enter the market by 

an additional 6 to 12 months.

MODDERN Cures would establish a council to develop educational tools and programs to promote a 

common understanding of the terminology and definitions related to the development and use of 

diagnostics.  In these ways, the MODDERN Cures Act will speed the development of new treatments and diagnostic tools that can improve and extend the lives of people living with Lou Gehrig’s Disease. MODDERN CURES ACT

The ALS Association urges Congress to enact the MODDERN Cures Act (H.R. 3091) to accelerate the 

development of new diagnostic tools and a treatment for Lou Gehrig’s Disease. 

Drug restores cells that are missing in MS patients

http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/10/drug-restores-cells-that-are-missing-in-ms-patients/

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is an autoimmune disease in which the immune system destroys the myelin sheaths surrounding neurons. These myelin sheaths are often likened to the insulation surrounding electrical wires; they enable neurons to transmit electrical impulses specifically and efficiently.

Cells called oligodendrocytes make myelin and do so throughout adulthood. People with MS have plenty of oligodendrocyte precursor cells (OPCs), and these cells are able to migrate to sites where myelination is required. The problem is that these precursor cells fail to mature properly into myelin producing cells, and this failure promotes disease progression.

Many current approved therapies for MS are immunosuppressants, but researchers at The Scripps Research Institute tried another tack. They screened 100,000 (or so) structurally diverse molecules to try to find some that would induce OPCs to mature. The researchers identified compounds that could make rodent OPCs mature into oligodendrocytes in a dish.

A thyroid hormone can do this, but it “has several physiological effects that make it unattractive as a therapeutic agent for MS.” Other compounds that work “have limited therapeutic potential due to off-target activities, toxicity, poor brain exposure, and/or demonstrated lack of in vivo efficacy.” But these compounds provided valuable positive controls in the experiment, showing that it was possible to pick out these useful compounds.

One of the most effective inducers of OPC maturation they found is a drug called benztropine, which is already available in oral form as an approved treatment for Parkinson’s disease. Once the researchers homed in on benztropine, they confirmed that the oligodendrocytes it had coaxed into maturity could in fact make myelin when in a dish with neurons. The team then analyzed benztropine’s activity in a mouse model of MS, finding that it diminished the clinical severity of the acute and remission phases of the disease while pretty much eliminating the relapse phase. In this model system, benztropine worked at least as well as the immunosuppressive drugs now in use to treat MS.

Benztropine isn't ideal. Its use is “associated with dose-dependent adverse neurological side effects”—cognitive changes, blurred vision, anorexia, and psychosis. So the authors decided to see if it could be used at a lower dose when combined with other therapies.

Fingolimod is an immunosuppressant that has reduced the relapse rate in relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis by over half. But its use can lead to a dose-dependent bradycardia—it slows the heart rate. So in the researchers' mouse model, a combination of suboptimal doses of this with benztropine yielded a decrease in clinical severity. The combination of drugs was as good in terms of results as the standard therapeutic dose of Fingolimod.

Since the side effects are dose dependent, reducing the dose of each drug without sacrificing efficacy is a big deal. The authors hope that remyelination enhancers like benztropine might one day become good clinical options to treat MS, and they are now examining other hits from their initial screen to find some more.

Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee

This is a brilliant and funny show hosted by Jerry Seinfeld.  Each episode is only 15 minutes and worth it.  Enjoy.

http://comediansincarsgettingcoffee.com/

Ford's 2015 Mustang: Why Fans Will Hate It

By Daniel Miller | More Articles   September 28, 2013 | Comments (61)

Artist Rendering of the 2015 Mustang. Photo credit: Autoguide.com, Read more here.

Bold, powerful, iconic. Those are three perfect words to describe the history of Ford's (NYSE:F  ) Mustang. From the old movie duels with the Camaro to the race track and car shows, the Mustang has captured fans across America for decades. Unfortunately, like everything else, the Mustang will need to evolve to survive. That's about to take place next year, when Ford unveils its 2015 Mustang, and it will surely ruffle the feathers of longtime fans. The preceding photo is a rendering, and Ford has kept its new-look Mustang under tight lock and key. One thing is for sure: It will be drastically different.

Will its evolution be the key to turning its sales decline around? Or will it be the cause of its ultimate demise?

Sales crash
Vehicle sales crashed to the floor during the Great Recession but have since rebounded. Unfortunately, some vehicles were left behind in the recent rebound, the Mustang included.

Graph by author. Information credit: Automotive News DataCenter. 2013. *Projected from sales through August.

The Great Recession sealed the coffin on the Mustang as we know it. Consumer preferences switched to vehicles like Ford's new Fusion, which offered much better fuel economy and unique style in a typically bland mid-size segment. After the recession, many people suddenly tossed aside larger gas-guzzling vehicles for smaller, fuel-efficient rides. If the Mustang doesn't adapt to this change, it risks fading away into obsolescence.

Graph by author. Information credit: Consumer Reports.

Evolution
Ford has two key things in mind when it comes to the all-new 2015 Mustang, and loyal fans might not like the end result. First, it has to appease the changing consumer attitude in the U.S., which means it will be receiving different engine options to improve fuel efficiency.Rumors are spreading that it could include three options: a 2.5-liter four-cylinder EcoBoost engine that puts out 300 horsepower, a 3.7-liter six-cylinder that would put out 305hp but supposedly could be upped to nearly 400, and the classic 5.0-liter eight-cylinder engine that puts out 475hp-plus.

Though these are rumors, they make perfect sense to me. Also, for the first time, an EcoBoost turbocharged engine will be a prime option -- especially overseas. That sound you just heard was loyal fans pounding their keyboards at the thought of an EcoBoost Mustang.

One of the most important things to consider is that Ford is becoming much more efficient and profitable as a company, thanks in part to Alan Mulally's "One Ford" vision. Consider that 85% of vehicle sales will be from nine platforms by the end of this year. That means the new-look Mustang will need to be smaller and more globally oriented -- definitely not the pure American Mustang of old. According to Edmunds, Ford is working to remove about 400 pounds from the current model that weighs in at roughly 3,500 pounds. It's also believed the Mustang will check in about 15 inches shorter and 6 inches narrower.

The author's ride. Yeah, he put that in there.

TakeawayLike it or not, for the Mustang to rebound and live on, it must evolve. It can't stay in its retro form forever, although I rather enjoy the look. Right now, Ford as a company is almost entirely dependent on North America for its profits. That has to change, and Ford wants its iconic Pony car to gallop on the global stage, helping the folks at the Blue Oval complete one of the greatest business turnarounds in history.

Consider that the Mustang evolution could help Ford conquer two continents. Right now, even amid a European market still in decline, Ford has managed to increase its wholesale volume, market share, revenues, pre-tax profits, and operating margins -- a huge win. That charge has been led by Ford's Fiesta and Focus models, and the Mustang could take the baton and continue the charge as Europe rebounds.

Ford's Asia-Pacific-Africa region, which is mainly China, equates to about 8% of overall revenue. Ford expects that figure to increase to 40% by 2020, a large and quick jump. If the company can make the Mustang as popular overseas as it was here, while not alienating the U.S. fan, it could mean huge things for company market share and profits.

Yes, loyal Mustang fans may hate the all-new design that will be unveiled next year, but it certainly isn't going to die off. I believe the evolution of the Mustang is about to bring its best generation yet, and it could quickly change from an American icon to a global icon. How can you hate that?

With Simple Protest, Players Join Push for N.C.A.A. Reform

By GREG BISHOP    Published: September 24, 2013 

The protest took the form of three words, or three letters, scribbled onto equipment tape or actual equipment last Saturday during college football games. All Players United, or A.P.U., it read.

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Nam Y. Huh/Associated Press

Northwestern quarterback Kain Colter was one of the players who participated in a protest Saturday.

Enlarge This Image

Mike Zarrilli/Getty Images

Georgia Tech’s Vad Lee wore a message on his left wrist.

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The wording was simple, the message symbolic, and yet the protest added another voice to the growing chorus for N.C.A.A. reform. The latest outcry came not from administrators, coaches, former players or advocates. It came from current players.

The National College Players Association, the group that organized the protest, said 28 players from Northwestern, Georgia and Georgia Tech participated.

“I’ve been involved in this thing for a long time, and what I witnessed Saturday is something I never thought I’d witness,” said Sonny Vaccaro, a former sneaker marketing executive and a longtime N.C.A.A. antagonist. “The players actually feel they have a certain degree of rights, and they’re not afraid to voice them. Even though that’s coming out in drips, it’s coming out.”

The next step centers on momentum, on whether more players at more universities join the protest and if the N.C.P.A. and other organizations with similar aims can turn three words into a catalyst for reform.

Ramogi Huma said he believed they could. A former football player at U.C.L.A., Huma is the president of the N.C.P.A., and he had so many interviews this week he lost count. Even his neighbor, a former college baseball player, asked him if he had any wrist tape to mark.

Huma is blunt on the subject of a boycott, an extreme extension of Saturday’s protest. That is not what his organization has advocated, not something, he said, that has been discussed. But it is a possibility that cannot be dismissed in the current climate.

Last week, Houston Texans running back Arian Foster admitted in a coming documentary — “Schooled: The Price of College Sports” — that he accepted money while at Tennessee. Then Floyd Mayweather Jr. posted a photograph of a betting slip on his Twitter account, which showed he won $200,000 on Texas A&M. It was accompanied by a note to Johnny Manziel. “Congratulations @JManziel2 for putting on a fantastic show,” it read. “He may not be able to make money off himself but I can.”

Then Mark Emmert, the N.C.A.A. president, told more than 100 faculty representatives from Division I universities this week that “the board anticipates a lot of change” in the next six to eight months. Then the N.C.A.A. announced Tuesday it had restored some scholarships Penn State lost in penalties levied in the wake of the university’s sexual abuse scandal, penalties that were widely considered excessive. Critics took that as another sign of Emmert in retreat.

“The N.C.A.A. is under fire,” Huma said. “America as a whole believes that reform is necessary. College sports is at a tipping point. And what you saw Saturday, is players weighing in on that in a very real way.”

The protest resulted from a series of conference calls held by N.C.P.A. player councils over the past few months. They had witnessed the backlash from when current players joined the Ed O’Bannon lawsuit against the N.C.A.A., and wanted to show support. Someone threw out an idea. Huma liked it. The question was whether players would participate.

Word, he said, spread throughout locker rooms Saturday, and the 28 players who participated were more than expected. That group included Vad Lee, the quarterback at Georgia Tech, and Kain Colter, the quarterback at Northwestern, and members of Georgia’s offensive line. All declined interviews this week.

In a release on its Web site, the N.C.P.A. listed several goals for its A.P.U. campaign: to show support for players who joined the O’Bannon lawsuit and support for players who joined concussion suits against the N.C.A.A.; to stand by players “harmed by N.C.A.A. rules”; to demonstrate unity among those seeking reform; and to direct a portion of $1 billion in new television revenue to guarantee what it called “basic protections,” like “guaranteed scholarship renewals for permanently injured players.”

The N.C.A.A. released a statement that said it supported open and civil debate.

The debate includes current players who expressed their support in public, something Ed Cunningham, a former player who became an analyst and documentarian, said he would have participated in while in college at Washington. College football was not big business then, in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

“The players’ statement last weekend drew me in,” Cunningham said. “Now we can see players engaged in a debate that, frankly, it’s about time we’re having. The time has come to address this economic model in college sports, especially in major college football.”

Not everyone felt that way. The sportscaster Dan Dakich posted on his Twitter account that “it would be great” if the scholarships of the involved players were pulled. Paul Johnson, the coach at Georgia Tech, said in a news conference that “six guys” did not represent his team, that they should have told him beforehand. He said he asked one player what he hoped to accomplish, and the player offered only a vague answer in response.

“A lot of that’s being blown way out of proportion,” Johnson said.

Not to those engaged in N.C.A.A. reform. That the N.C.A.A. itself responded to the protest marked progress for Huma.

“It lends credibility to the idea that reform is inevitable and players will be empowered,” he said. “They will have a say. Look for more A.P.U. this weekend and in the weeks to come.”

Fallen Vietnam airmen finally laid to rest

By Melinda Henneberger, Published: September 23 E-mail the writer

More than 44 years after their A-26 was shot down over Laos, Air Force Maj. James E. Sizemore and Maj. Howard V. Andre were buried side by side on Monday.

The interment ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery, complete with twin caskets and colors teams, an escort and a firing party, formally ended the decades that the officers’ families had spent in limbo, awaiting the return of remains from a country where the United States never officially fought, from a mission that never officially occurred. Sizemore and Andre were on “a night armed reconnaissance mission,” as the Pentagon described it in a release last week announcing that the airmen had been identified.

Vietnam veterans who made it back alive were more often blamed than thanked. The families of the missing in action bore an additional burden and counted heavily on one another, mourning but never fully moving on. 

The Sizemores and Andres lived with a particular emptiness: Their men gave their lives in a secret war, without any official acknowledgment. Military and CIA operations to cut off North Vietnamese supply routes and rescue pilots who were shot down were covert in Laos, a neutral country enmeshed in its own civil war.

A-26 wreckage first was spotted in 1993, and the families waited an additional 17 years for the site to be excavated. Just five months ago, the remains were identified. Even that news was not what you’d call unalloyed, of course. And as the families planned Monday’s send-off, the Air Force informed them that budget cuts caused by the sequester had left it too cash-strapped to provide the traditional fly-over with its “missing man” aerial salute at their joint grave site.

Eight volunteer airmen in borrowed planes filled in — one in an A-26 just like the attack bomber Sizemore and his navigator, Andre, flew.

At the Arlington funeral home where survivors gathered Sunday night, James Sizemore’s daughter, Rebecca Sizemore, remembered seeing her father for the last time the week before she turned 13. Later that year, on July 8, 1969, he and Andre crashed after taking hostile fire.

“My memory is stuck in that time,” she said, “and I still ask myself today would he be proud of me. It’s weird to be this age and all your memories [of your father] are of childhood.”

Her father did have a chance to show her his alma mater, Georgia Tech, where he first met Andre, his co-pilot during night missions dropping bombs on truck convoys on the Ho Chi Minh trail.

Georgia Tech “was the only place I applied” to college, she said. Like her father, she studied engineering. She wonders now what her late mother must have thought of the teenager who comforted herself by wearing her father’s khaki pants and plaid shirt. Her brother, James Jeff Sizemore, used to go by his middle name but prefers James now, in tribute.

For them, the conflict of a lifetime ago isn’t over, even now: “Our hopes have been answered,” in the form of Sizemore’s DNA found at a crash site 12 miles south of Ban Na Mai in Xiangkhoang province, Rebecca Sizemore said. “But I’ll never have closure on losing my father.

Those who came to pay their respects at the service Monday included a man who had joined the squadron soon after the two were killed and the childhood friend of the Sizemores, who sang “Because” at their wedding. The recent widow of another member of the 609th Special Operations Squadron, who had packed up the fallen men’s belongings after they died, was there, too, wearing a hydraulic connector from an A-26 on a chain around her neck.

James Elmo Sizemore grew up in Lawrenceville, Ill., where his parents ran a small grocery store, and he joined the Air Force in 1950. He served in Korea, lived in Germany with his family for several years, and was due to come home in two weeks when he volunteered for his final mission on the trail. He was 38.

Memphis-born Howard Andre, who was 34, was quieter than his fun-loving friend Jim, said Andre’s widow, Judith Herron, of Bend, Ore. “But when he had something to say, it was worth listening to, and I liked that very much about him,” from the time she first met him in a Methodist church in 1959. He was supposed to be on his way home from war soon, too. “We were preparing to meet in Hawaii when I got the knock on the door.”

The Andres also had two children, Nancy and Brad, who describes losing his dad at the age of 9 as “never getting to wake up from a bad dream.”

There have been compensations, like the deep connection between the two grieving families. And the knowledge that “he loved his profession,” said Herron, smiling and crying at the same time, “so I know he died doing what he wanted to do, which is a comfort to me.”

And the long-awaited service? “It’s opening a window that had been closed for a long, long time,” she said, “but my son is so much like his dad, I think of Howard every day.” Like the children, she thinks there’s no such thing as closure.

The two men’s caskets were opened for visitation at the funeral home. Inside were their dress uniforms and medals, along with Andre’s ID bracelets and a photo of Sizemore’s wife, Becky, in a one-piece, 1950s-style bathing suit.

It did feel right to lay the fighters to rest side by side, James Jeff Sizemore said, given that they’d already “been in the ground together for 44 years.”

“The only honor they could give them,” he said, was to allow them that. “You can’t keep the Andres away from the Sizemores.”

At the end of the burial service at Arlington, Air Force Brig. Gen. Brian Killough knelt before the two families to hand them the flags that had covered the caskets. Then the honor guard marched away in unison, and as the drumbeats from the band grew fainter, the two families were left alone to say goodbye
.

Week 5 Coaches Poll

USA Today Coaches Poll Top-25 Week 5

Rank	Team (First Place Votes)	Record	Points	BR Ranking
1	Alabama (59)	3-0	1547	1
2	Oregon (3)	3-0	1480	2
3	Ohio State	4-0	1399	3
4	Clemson	3-0	1332	5
5	Stanford	3-0	1312	4
6	LSU	4-0	1161	6
7	Louisville	4-0	1140	8
8	Florida State	3-0	1121	7
9	Texas A&M	3-1	1044	10
10	Georgia	2-1	1020	9
11	Oklahoma State	3-0	909	11
12	Oklahoma	3-0	863	15
13	South Carolina	2-1	825	12
14	UCLA	3-0	731	13
15	Miami (FL)	3-0	613	14
16	Northwestern	4-0	560	18
17	Michigan	4-0	534	19
18	Baylor	3-0	465	16
19	Florida	2-1	449	20
20	Washington	3-0	427	17
21	Mississippi	3-0	331	21
22	Notre Dame	3-1	317	22
23	Fresno State	3-0	156	25
24	Wisconsin	3-1	98	23
25	Texas Tech	4-0	92	24