Blood Brothers

A story from the FBI...

A LIFE-AND-DEATH STORY That Really Hit Home

On Friday, dozens of FBI agents and support professionals at our Headquarters in Washington lined up to give blood to the brave men and women of our nation’s military—the first time that the U.S. Armed Services Blood Program has ever held a blood drive outside of a military facility.

How that happened is quite a story.

It began with an urgent phone call last August. A contractor at FBI Headquarters named Matt Dick was contacted by the founder of a non-profit group called “Soldiers’ Angels” that supports soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A group of Army rangers, she explained, had been on patrol in the mountains of Afghanistan, gathering information and verifying intelligence about insurgent activities in the area. Suddenly, they were surrounded and attacked by a much larger force. In the fierce, seven-hour firefight that followed, two members of the unit were killed, including the commanding officer, and another seven wounded.

Now, she said, one of the young lieutenants from the unit was bringing the commanding officer’s body back to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery just outside the nation’s capital. But since they’d just been called up, the lieutenant and three of his wounded comrades had no dress uniforms for the funeral and little money to buy them with.

The founder of Soldiers’ Angels, who was calling from California, needed someone in the Washington area to buy the uniforms for the soldiers once she wired the money. “Can you help?” she asked Matt, whom she knew and had worked with before.

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However, that would not address emissions from burning the fuel, said Robert Williams, a senior research scientist at Princeton University. To do more than simply break even, the industry must reduce the amount of coal used in the synthetic-fuel blend and supplement it with a fuel derived from Something that will make Farm State Senators Happy plants, Williams said.

In a recent letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Rep. Waxman wrote that a promise to control greenhouse gas emissions from synthetic fuels was not enough. Waxman and the committee's ranking Republican, Virginia's Tom Davis, cited a provision in the energy bill approved by Congress last year that bars federal agencies from entering contracts for synthetic fuels unless they emit More Pork for More Senators the same or fewer greenhouse gases as petroleum.