Letters

My father, Raphael Alonzo Montaño, is a decorated World War II vet and followed General George S. Patton his whole military career. He landed in Normandy on the USS Omaha and was the radio operator for the D-Day invasion. He helped free England, Italy and other countries Hitler ran over. He was at the Battle of the Bulge, where the United States Army did not send winter gear to our troops — especially socks and boots. My father has had foot problems since then, but never complained.
At the time of his departure from the U.S. Army, he was promised $45 from U.S. General Patton to help with coming home. He has never received it.
Since October 2010, we have been trying to get help from the Albuquerque Veterans Administration — but to no avail.
Thanks to Senator Tom Udall — we have seen more progress. Did you know that the Veterans Administration and Medicare will not talk to each other and will not help one another — even if a U.S. vet’s life is on the line?
This is a U.S. law passed by our Congress. One other tidbit of information — did you know that all WWII vets paperwork was lost to a fire in St. Louis, Mo.?
The VA will not help a vet unless the VA Administration has a current picture of the vet taken at any VA facility.

A current public issue is whether county water wells should be drilled in county park lands on the edge of White Rock Canyon.
The public discussion has dealt little, if any, with alternative drilling technology, namely, directional drilling, also called slant drilling.
Directional drilling goes back 50 years, but major advances came as computers became commonplace.
Directional drilling is the technique of drilling wells at a slant, instead of always boring straight down.
Not only can holes be drilled at an angle, their paths can curve and bend to reach more places under ground from fewer work sites.
A well can easily bend enough to reach places up to 1,200 feet off to any side of a drill site and thousands of feet down.
Lateral wells can extend much farther to the side — out four miles and more — at still greater cost.
Up to four wells can be drilled from a single drilling pad.
The other side of the story is always cost. Directional drilling is more complex, which may add $30,000 to $100,000 to the cost of a well within the easier 1,200-foot distance from the pad.
At more cost, the range can go out the four miles and more. These dollars have meaning only when compared with the typical cost of a vertical well: about $1 million.

Sixty-nine years ago, the SS Paul Hamilton — carrying 7,000 tons of explosives — was torpedoed, resulting in the loss of the ship and all 580 men aboard. 
The ship left Hampton Roads, Virginia, on April 2, 1944, and was headed with munitions and fresh troops to the theater of operations in North Africa.
Near sunset, on April 20, the Hamilton was attacked by German Ju 88 bombers, 30 miles off the Coast of Cape Bengut, Algiers, in the Mediterranean Sea. 
The attacking aircraft launched its torpedo less than 150 feet from the Hamilton.
Immediately after the torpedo hit, a violent explosion threw debris and black smoke high in the air, and when the smoke cleared, there was no sign of the ship. 
During the attack on that convoy, the USS Lansdale also was sunk, with the loss of its
47 crew members.
In a Veterans Today article, Jim W. Dean noted that, “details [surrounding the Hamilton] were classified for 50 years ... only two bodies were recovered and are buried at the Allied cemetery in Algiers.
They were identified through fingerprints, so those two families had some closure.”

 Tuesday is Equal Pay Day. It marks how far into the year a woman must work to earn as much as a man earned in the previous year. The day is an unhappy marker of how far we have to go before we close the gender wage gap. This gap hasn’t budged in nearly a decade, leaving women and their families to suffer the effects of lost wages.

Fifty years ago, President John F. Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act, which requires employers to give women and men equal pay for equal work. At that time women were paid 59¢ for every dollar men were paid. Today that figure is 77¢. Although we’ve made significant strides since 1963, pay parity continues to elude us.