Sons of the American Legion Seminole Squadron 111

08/08/2026

08/08/2026

The best way to manage your own membership account with Sons of the American Legion is to download the app and use it conveniently on your telephone. It is a wealth of knowledge at your fingertips. Please find the app by following this link.

08/08/2026

Iran repositioned T-72 tanks toward its southern border on August 1 as Oman-mediated talks over the Strait of Hormuz and Tehran's nuclear program gain momentum.

A retired Pentagon strategist with nearly five decades in uniform says the movement of conventional army forces — not the Revolutionary Guard — signals Tehran is preparing to defend its own territory against a potential escalation beyond airstrikes.

The author argues professional militaries don't reposition armor casually: the logistics costs are too high unless commanders believe something real may be coming.

👉 Full story here: https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/iran-moving-tanks-decades-military-planner-taught-what-means

08/06/2026

In 1864 a Union fleet was trapped and doomed on a drying Louisiana river, until a former lumberjack from Wisconsin saved it with an idea everyone said was impossible. 🌊

It happened during the Red River Campaign, the Union's failed push into central Louisiana. After the army was turned back, its supporting fleet of ironclads and gunboats found itself stranded above the rapids at Alexandria. The Red River had fallen too low, and the heavy warships could not pass over the rocks. The Confederates were closing in. The navy prepared, grimly, to blow up its own fleet rather than let it be captured.

Then a lieutenant colonel named Joseph Bailey, who had worked the northern timber rivers before the war, proposed something audacious. Dam the river. Raise the water by force. Float the fleet out. Senior officers thought he was mad. He had thousands of soldiers do it anyway. 🪵

For weeks the men labored in the current, felling trees, hauling brush and stone, sinking barges loaded with brick, building a great wing dam across the Red. The water rose behind it foot by foot. When a section finally gave way under the pressure, Bailey used the surge itself, sending the lighter boats shooting through the gap on the rushing water, then rebuilding and easing the heavy ironclads over.

Every ship was saved. A fleet that should have been lost or destroyed steamed back down the river because one engineer understood water better than the generals understood defeat. Bailey received the Thanks of Congress and a promotion. His dam at Alexandria became a legend of military engineering.

The campaign was a Union failure in almost every way. The one shining exception was a wall of Louisiana timber thrown across a stubborn river by a man who refused to accept that the water had won.

Sometimes history turns on a general. Sometimes it turns on a lumberjack who knew what a river could be made to do.

08/06/2026

08/06/2026

On this day in Ranger history......06 August 1756 – General Howe authorized Robert Rogers to raise a battalion of Rangers for service with the British Army.

Rogers' Rangers was initially a provincial company from the colony of New Hampshire, attached to the British Army during the Seven Years' War (called the French and Indian War in the United States). The unit was quickly adopted into the British army as an independent ranger company. It was trained by Major Robert Rogers as a rapidly deployed light infantry force tasked mainly with reconnaissance as well as conducting special operations against distant targets. Their tactics were built on earlier colonial precedents and were codified for the first time by Rogers. The tactics proved remarkably effective, so much so that the initial company was expanded into a ranging corps of more than a dozen companies (containing as many as 1,200–1,400 men at its peak). The ranger corps became the chief scouting arm of British Crown forces by the late 1750s. The British valued them highly for gathering intelligence about the enemy.

---Mud