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Monday, May 31, 2010 THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER www.philly.com A7 Castille, others fight for a hero's upgrade West is hopeful on jirga jT' 3 the last time I saw him." 4 A -Jt a' JESSICA GRIFFIN File Photograph Ron Castille, the chief justice of Pennsylvania, in 2007. He often pays tribute: "Angel Mendez gave me my life MENDEZ from Al at veterans events and other speaking engagements why he was able to achieve what he did. "Angel Mendez gave me my life and sacrificed his," says Castille. He says he has tried to live for Mendez and has campaigned, along with Marines, members of Congress, and others, to ejisure that Angel Mendez's sacrifice is honored with the nation's highest military decoration the Medal of Honor. Mendez was posthumously awarded the Navy Cross and promoted to sergeant.

But his selfless actions, in the face of a deadly hail of gunfire, deserve more, said Castille, adding: "I will always remember him." "I lost a brother, but I guess I also gained one," said Mendez's brother, Ismael "Iszzy" Mendez, 68, referring to Castille. "Angel went beyond the call of duty; he disregarded his own safety," added Mendez, an Army veteran who lives in Fort Myers, Fla. "It would be great to acknowledge his act of heroism." Over the last several years, U.S. Rep. Michael McMahon N.Y.) and U.S.

Sen. Charles Schumer N.Y.) have joined the effort to upgrade Angel Mendez's medal, sending letters to the military on his behalf. "You never know what the ripple effect of one selfless act will said McMahon. "In this case, the ultimate sacrifice of one individual allowed another to live on to become Pennsylvania's highest judge." One of the organizations pushing the hardest for Mendez is the Mount Loretto Alumni Association, whose members, like Mendez, were raised at the Mission of the Immaculate Virgin, an orphanage on Mount Loretto, Staten Island, N.Y. "We feel his actions were of such a caliber that he deserves the Medal of Honor," said Al Richichi, president of the association.

That request, now awaiting action by the Navy, "is probably sitting on a desk somewhere," said Dennis Tobin, commandant of the Marine Corps League, Department of The Due Pho battle On the afternoon of March 16, 1967, Angel Mendez was looking for Viet Cong at Due Pho and was ready for action, with a M-79 grenade launcher, a mean-looking weapon resembling a sawed-off shotgun. Four platoons one at the point with Castille, two on the flanks, and one in the rear passed through a village and rice paddy there. "I was the meanest mother in the valley," said Castille. "I had 40 troops, machine guns, rockets, hand grenades, and 81mm mortars." He could also call in fire from 105mm howitzers, 175mm long guns, a destroyer off shore, and A-4 and F-4 fighter jets. Despite the heavy firepower, they were vulnerable.

Marines on one of the flanks didn't properly clear a village, leaving others in the rear open to ambush by Viet Cong who had apparently been hiding in so-called spider holes. By the time the enemy opened fire, Castille and his platoon had already made it to the safety of a fortified village, surrounded by a 10-foot wall of earth. He didn't stay long. The young lieutenant was ordered back to the rice paddy with three squads of 12 men to help pinned-down comrades and pick up the casualties. "It's a tradition of the Marines that we don't leave our dead and wounded on the battlefield," Castille said.

The only cover was the covering fire of artillery. The Marines entered a killing field raked by the automatic fire of enemy guns, including a Chinese-made machine gun. "Bullets were flying, and artillery was coming in while the guys in back of us were firing machine guns and M-14s rifles," Castille said. "There were clouds of dust from explosions. You could smell gunpowder, and palm trees and bamboo and thatch huts were burning." In the chaos, a round from the Viet Cong's machine gun crashed into Castille's right thigh.

He tried outlooks from five major forecast iff Courtesy of the Mendez family Marine Cpl. Angel Mendez, who was killed in 1967 in Vietnam while saving Lt. Ron Castille. New York, on Staten Island, where Angel Mendez is now buried. "We've been working on this for at least seven years.

What more can you give than your own life?" Mendez's backstory Castille had known Angel Mendez for only three months when the two of them were ordered to take part in Operation DeSoto, a search-and-destroy mission in Quang Ngai province. "You get to know each other pretty quickly in a combat situation," Castille said. "I knew he grew up in an orphanage. He always said he found a family in the Marine Corps." Mendez's parents were unable to care for him and his siblings because of health and financial problems. Two were sent to foster homes and six including Angel and Ismael were placed at the Mount Loretto orphanage.

At age 18, many left the orphanage for military service. "You lived in an orphanage where people told you what to do and gave you three meals a day, and you went to another place where people told you what to do and gave you three meals a day," said Mendez was described as "easygoing" and "soft-spoken" by his brother Ismael and Ismael's wife, Aida. In 1966, shortly before Angel went to Vietnam, the couple went to a movie with him and a girlfriend. "He told me, 'Maybe I won't come recalled Ismael Mendez. "I told him, 'Don't worry about it.

You'll be That was Stormy Outlooks Here are the seasonal hurricane 4 to stanch the bleeding by pushing mud into the open wound, but he couldn't move. That's when Mendez made his way toward the lieutenant and the other Marines, firing his grenade launcher at the enemy. "I told him to stay where he was," Castille said. "I said, 'Stay under But he defied my orders and came to get me. He had a compress and tied it on.

Then, he picked me up" and headed nearly 100 yards to the friendly lines. Mendez was hit in the shoulder, and two comrades tried to help him, but the corporal wouldn't release his lieutenant, carrying him to the wall where he shielded him from fire. At that moment, just inches from safety, Mendez was hit again, this time fatally, as he and Castille went over the wall together. During the desperate fighting that followed, helicopters came in to extract the dead and wounded. Castille helped oversee the transfer and later received a Bronze Star with a for valor for his heroism.

For him, though, the battle was not over. As his helicopter took off, bullets peppered the aircraft, passing through its skin. One fragmented and struck Castille in his wounded leg. "You lose all that blood and circulation, and they have to amputate," the chief justice said. Medical personnel "wanted me to sign a piece of paper.

They said, 'Here, lieu JIRGA from Al The Electoral Complaints Commission announced Sunday that 85 candidates had been preliminarily barred from participating in the parliamentary elections because they are members of illegal armed groups. They will have the right to appeal. Still, the number is far more than that in the first round of parliamentary elections in 2005, when just 17 people were disqualified for the same reason, according to former electoral commissioner Fahim Hakim. The increase suggests that a more rigorous review system is now in place, analysts say. Even as the peace efforts proceed in Kabul, the capital, security appeared to be deteriorating in districts in the east and south of the country and on the western border, where Afghan insurgents trained in Iran are returning to fight and smuggling in weapons, McChrystal said.

I "There is clear evidence of Iranian activities, in some cases supplying weaponry and training to the Taliban Despite that is inap-propriate," P63C6 he said. efforts, In Nuristan, SORie onthecoun- areas were try eastern border, Worsening, hundreds of local and Pakistani Taliban fighters have taken control of a remote district near the Pakistan border, Barg-e-Matal. The number of fighters who have crossed the border from Pakistan swelled through the week and now is between 1,000 and 1,500, said Gen. Za-man Mamozai, the commander of the Afghan Border Police for the eastern region of Afghanistan. They are "mostly from Pakistan and are conducting collective attacks," he said.

It appears that many of the Taliban fighters from Pakistan had come to Nuristan in search of a new haven after having come under attack from the Pakistani army in Pakistan. There are few Afghan security forces in Nuristan's rugged mountains and only a small number of U.S. troops. NATO leaders say that they cannot control the entire country with the number of troops they have and had to rely on Afghan forces in remote areas. But because not enough Afghans have been trained, NATO officials say they may have to live with some insurgent havens.

"As we execute our strategy and our capacity to secure areas, we must prioritize the order in which we do those, and how we deploy our forces and our assets," McChrystal said when asked about whether Barg-e-Matal was being allowed to become a sanctuary. "The Taliban can still muster strength in places, and there are a lot of unknowns there," added a senior NATO officer, speaking about Nuristan on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record on the matter. The U.S. command confirmed that a U.S. service member was killed Sunday in a small-arms attack in southern Afghanistan.

May is already the deadliest month this year for U.S. troops, with 33 deaths. In the southeastern province of Khost, a barely completed high school, built with international aid, was blown up late Saturday by men using rocket-propelled grenades and bombs. The school, which cost $220,000 to build, would have provided classrooms for 1,300 students, said Musa Majrooh, the spokesman for the Khost Education Department. A Taliban spokesman denied that his group was involved in the blast.

In Nangahar province, in the east, which until recently was relatively calm, two bombings killed five members of the Afghan security forces, and in Badakshan province in the far northeast, six counternarcotics officers were killed when their patrol vehicle was blown up by a homemade bomb. A Forecasters predict a hot, stormy summer sign I said, 'What's 'We have to take your leg "I said, 'I'm not signing he recalled. "They said, 'Well, you can and I said, 'I don't They took the leg off anyway against my will." Before Due Pho, "I was a combat warrior," he said. "After that, I was a handicapped person." Yet, always goal-oriented, Castille finished law school and went on to significant achievements. "He was meant to live," said Aida Mendez.

"He should have been killed that day in 1967, and yet he survived. That's fate." Young Marine's heroism Forty-one years later, in 2008, Castille was installed as the chief justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, and he gave a speech. As he had done at other important events in his life, he mentioned Due Pho and the heroism of a young Marine. "Angel saved my life that day," he said. In his 18th-floor office this month, with the city spread out below him, Castille picked up a framed photo of himself in his dress Marine uniform.

It was taken in 1966 shortly before he was deployed. "I still think about him," he said of Sgt. Angel Mendez. Contact staff writer Edward Colimore at 856-779-3833 or ecolimorephillynews.com. of La Nina, a warm Atlantic, and favorable upper-air winds "explosive." For obvious reasons, hurricanes are a huge concern in the Gulf region, said Ken Graham, a National Weather Service meteorologist with the New Orleans-area office.

Gulf beaches could end up marinating in that spewing BP oil, particularly if a storm passes to the west of the spill, Graham said. But he said that the real danger was in the potential hurricane destruction, and that concentrating on the oil would be like focusing on the salad instead of the entree. "Everyone is talking oil," Graham said. "The bottom line is, the hurricane is going to get us." Bell said that although the signs were ominous, it was at least possible that La Nina wouldn't develop and that those Atlantic waters would cool a bit. But they are likely to remain tepid.

In fact, the upper levels of the ocean all over the world have been warming in recent decades, according to a recent paper in the journal Nature. Though global warming appears to the driving force, the historical records are so wanting that it's not clear whether the warming is unprecedented, said Josh Willis, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, one of the authors of the paper. The fact that the Atlantic waters are likely to stay warmer than usual would not be a welcome development for U.S. coastal residents and property owners. "It could be like the winter," Bastardi said.

"I said it was going to be bad, and it was worse than bad." Contact staff writer Anthony R. Wood at 610-313-8210 or twoodphillynews.com. Named storms are those with winds of at least 39 m.p.h.; hurricanes, 74 m.p.h.; and major hurricanes, 111 m.p.h. Tropical NOAA WSI AccuWeather Storm Risk State Univ. average Named storms 14-23 18 16-18 16 15 11 Hurricanes 8-14 10 10-11 9 8 6 Major hurricanes 3-7 5 5 4 4 2 forecasts were posted in April; the others were HURRICANES AND TROPICAL STORMS SINCE 1851 Tropical storms 3 Hurricanes services.

Colorado Seasonal released or updated last week. I i I. I II1 it Ml i wwmm miniiiiiil I I ISi 2000s The Philadelphia Inquirer SUMMER from Al likely to add to the tide of red ink that has swamped the government's flood-insurance program, already $18.7 billion in debt. Combined," that comes to about $700 per U.S. household.

In their outlooks, tropical-storm specialists point to an almost uncanny alignment of forces in the upper atmosphere, the tropical Pacific, and the North Atlantic. Hurricanes live off warm water, and the North Atlantic is a poor man's hot tub. "Right now it's very warm across the entire North Atlantic and the Caribbean Sea," said Gerry Bell, chief hurricane forecaster at the government's Climate Prediction Center. On Friday, for example, the water off Cape May was an almost-swimmable 67 degrees, about 5 degrees above normal. Warmer water would mean more water vapor, thus more humidity for those summer heat waves.

More ominous, surface-water temperatures in the hurricane brewery the subtrop-ics between Africa and the Caribbean are higher than they've ever been in the period of record, dating to the 19th century. That has everything to do with the winter of 2009-10 and the persistent air-pressure pattern in the North Atlantic that heaped more than six feet of snow on the Phila-i delphia-Washington corridor, Bell said. From January through April, that pattern disrupted the normal circulation over the Atlantic and virtually shut down the northerly trade winds that blow toward the tropics, Bell said. Those are the winds Christopher Columbus exploited in 1492. This year, without the cooling waters from the north, the tropical waters were able NOTE: The Colorado State and Tropical Storm 30 25 20 15 10 I i.l!!i II I i III imm KM! Mini 1800s SOURCES: Forecast agencies listed; historical to simmer.

The Atlantic already was primed because it has been locked in a so-called warm phase since 1995, the onset of the latest active-hurricane era. Researchers have found that active periods and lulls alternate in 15- to 40-year cycles directly tied to the warm and cool phases of the Atlantic. Some of the warmer summers on record in the East have coincided with the Atlantic's warm phase, but that connection isn't foolproof, said Todd Crawford, chief meteorologist with WSI a service in Massachusetts that serves energy interests. Remember, weather moves west to east. WSI is calling for a warm start to the summer with a crescendo of heat peaking in August.

The outlook posted by Commodity Weather Group in Washington also i Risk data II 11 1900s provided by Colorado State University foresees heat increasing in August, as does AccuWeather Inc. long-range specialist Joe Bastardi. In any event, Bastardi said, it will be much warmer around here than it was last summer, when temperatures were close to average. Along with other forecasters, he is much more certain about the Atlantic Basin hurricane season, which will begin Tuesday and last through Nov. 30.

He is calling for up to 18 named storms, those with winds of at least 39 m.p.h.; the average total is 11. He foresees perhaps 11 reaching hurricane status, with winds of at least 74 m.p.h.; the seasonal average is 6. And Bastardi thinks he might be lowballing it. "I'm wondering if I'm underdone, rather than overdone." Other major forecasts are in the same ballpark. WSI predicts 18 named storms; Philip Klotzbach and William M.

Gray at Colorado State University, which pioneered long-range hurricane outlooks, 15; and Tropical Storm Risk, a British service, 16. Bell and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are calling for 14 to 23 named storms. Bell said the upper range would depend on Atlantic waters' staying warm and the Pacific's cooling off. Last year, warm waters in the Equatorial Pacific, an El Nino event, generated strong west-to-east winds that sheared off developing storms in the Atlantic Basin. That helps explain why only three hurricanes formed in 2009.

El Nino has faded, and it appears that its opposite, La Nina cooling, is taking hold. During La Ninas, the shear shuts off. Bell called the combination J-.