On Sunday, my friends (Mary Anne and Larry) and I left for Conway, Ark to stand with the Arkansas Patriot Guard to honor Pvt William Long and his family. Pvt Long was killed in a terrorist attack on our land, his memory needs to live on. The injustice by the media in the coverage of this attack on our soil left little coverage on this Soldier’s death. You can read other postings of mine on this attack here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

KATV7 has a short write up on the funeral. It was nice to see that a Democrat Governor (Bebe) attend the funeral. He even came around to the Patriot Guard flag line and shook each of our hands thanking us for being there. In the over 3 years I’ve attended KIA funerals in Tennessee, I’ve never once seen Democrat Governor Bredeson attend a funeral. He didn’t even attend the funeral of 1LT William Eric Emmert who was killed in Iraq, Tn National Guard, 269th MP Co 117th MP BTN, spent more than a decade with THP, worked for the Governor’s security detail and most recently started with TBI.

Turnout for the funeral by Patriot Guard was awesome with members coming also from Missippi and Oklahoma. One of the Oklahoma members was the Gold Star father of Cpl Michael E. Thompson ,who died in a helicopter crash in Iraq on September 16, 2008. Cpl Thompson’s father has memorialized his son’s truck. The truck is such a wonderful memorial.

There was also a Veteran who has this cool memorial he has mounted on his motorcycle trailer.

I couldn’t go without taking a picture of the Tn PGR Mascot on the Memorial

I have some video footage of the long flag line and the PGR Motorcycle escort to the cemetery, however due to my ineptness, I can’t seem to figure out how to convert 3gp files to wmv files. Actually, I don’t think I have the correct codec, so in the conversion process the program crashes. Hopefully, I’ll get this figured out.

Keep the Long family in your prayers, they’ve got the youngest son deploying in the next few weeks to the Middle East while also trying to grieve for the loss of their other son.

Pvt William Long, PGR, Patriot Guard, terrorist attack on Little Rock recruiters, Abdul Hakim Muhammad, Carl Bledsoe

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