Wednesday, 11 July 2001 1330Z
Game balance... -12PackAttack

Okay, I'm going to break out my first rant with what I consider an epidemic of sorts in TFC. There are two issues that are making this game miserable to an extent, and it's a two-part problem. The first is the prevalence of Defense. Or not always the preponderance of D, but rather the serious lack of Offense. If you have ever ventured into the enemy base, you know first hand that the odds are stacked against you. First off, the D begin their job with full health/armor. They don't need a RocketJump/PipeJump to get where they are going, they don't have to cross a midfield with snipers zooming in on them, with potshots from the enemy O or just pesky DM'ers. They go to their spot on D, in their own base, on their own terms and set out to do their job. This is not to say D is easier than O, whether it is or not is immaterial to this argument. It is simply a fact that the D begin their task (usually) full up on H/A and with a respawn nearby if they need it. O on the other hand has to make it across the map and into enemy territory, which means they usually meet the enemy D at an already weakened state. On most maps there is no way to recharge health or armor in the enemy base. So, all this being said, in a map with a 5/D, 4/0 split things would be rather hectic. Let me clarify that I am not speaking about clan matches here, where the benefit of history together, Roger Wilco, set strats and such swing the pendulum towards giving the O a better chance... though in clan affairs the D have those same benefits.

Now, my whole focus here is game balance, which brings with it a more challenging and fulfilling game along with more enjoyment. The point I will try to make here is that the lopsided Defense heavy pubs are experiencing games that are not nearly what they could/should be. Now, from the lone Engy in the basements perspective his team might not be so D heavy. What he fails to realize is there is perhaps a DM'ing soldier on the bridge, a sniper or two, an HW guy in the RR and maybe a demo/soldier in the spiral somewhere. Not that they are all sticking like glue to some preset order, but they are NOT on O, they are spending their time killing whatever enemies they see, which makes them Defense. This becomes a problem when a full team of 9 is fielding only perhaps 2 O guys. And this scenario is not hypothetical, it's a scene that I encounter on a daily basis on several maps. The server where I spend my time has some extremely good talent, which only serves to further aggravate the situation posed here. And that situation is this... you have 2 Offense guys trying to break through an experienced teams 7 man D. For those who play D exclusively, I cannot impart to you how futile and frustrating this can be. It's similar to bashing your head against a concrete wall trying to get to the other side. "But", you say, "is it not our job to keep the enemy from capping the flag?". Yes, but only to an extent. This game is known as CTF, or CAPTURE THE FLAG. It's not known as SOTEC, or Shut Out The Enemy Completely. The goal is to CAPTURE flags. It is nearly impossible to do so with a 80% Defensive team. What I am trying to promote here is some Team 'balance'. If you have ended the 30 minute map and the enemy has not scored once... and your team has not scored once... you have not had a good game of TFC, my friends. Valve, in their infinite wisdom, I assure you... did not give us 9 classes and such great maps to have shut out games. Valve has always wanted balance. Balance is key. And balance is NOT 80%D, and some token O. The best games, the most intense, and the most memorable are those where their is a great struggle between the enemy O and the other O to cap, and the two teams D to hold their flag. There is no great struggle when the enemy O has no chance. There is no accomplishment in keeping out a couple O guys with a turtled up team. Sure, if you are one of those taking up that 7th D slot, your personal score will be a positive kill ratio, while the enemies will be like -4/56. But who has done more for their team? Who has been more important to their team, and more concerned about the teams goals?

For those of you who have played Offense in any serious manner, meaning staying dedicated it to it an entire map regardless of your success, YOU understand what I am saying. I played only Defense for quite a while of my TFC days starting from the beginning. It is much less stressful. And for a long time I thought it was important that the enemy NEVER cap. But that was young into my TFC career, and when one looks at the bigger picture that is not the goal of the game. If it was TFC would be coined a STF(Save The Flag), not CTF. I see some who will say they are Team players, perhaps even wear a TPF tag, and yet NEVER, EVER play anything but D, regardless of what your team needs. Let me tell you something, if you go D when your team already has an almost D makeup, you are NOT a team player. If you're that 3rd Engy, 2nd Sniper, etc, then you are not doing your team a favor. You do not 'win' by defense only, and if your team did get an early lead then closed up its a poor sportsmanship issue. TRUST me, go Offense sometimes, concert your effort with one or two teammates, and you'll feel much more rewarded then by getting the scraps that make it down to the basement every 5 minutes. That is no exaggeration, just 2 days ago an enemy Demo was taunting about how bored he was, seeing our O so infrequently down at the flag room that he was bored stiff. I encouraged him to go O, to which he laughed and said no. Now, we had constant O, they just couldn't make it through that brick wall to reach down to him, but God forbid he should go O and balance the game. Oh, and our team WAS ahead. I've seen people go O until the moment their flag was touched, then they turned back onto D to lock it down. People, let me tell you something... THEY ARE SUPPOSED TO CAP! Again, the evil enemy, they are SUPPOSED TO CAP. So your team is SUPPOSED TO CAP too.

Which brings me to my next point, the 2nd problem in this issue, which is Chasing. I can feel the flames already, heh. There's been a lot of debate over chasing of late, even as to its definition. For clarity, chasing as I use the term is NOT taking pot shots at enemy O on the way to the enemies base. Chasing is the act of an Offensive player turning around and "chasing" the enemy O back into his own base. When that O player does that, he is now effectively playing D. Offensive means you are trying to capture the enemies flag, which is difficult to do running towards your own base without said flag. Just last night, on Badlands, someone I accused of chasing shouted back "What the f**k am I supposed to do, let the enemy go by without killing him?!". The answer folks, is a very simple YES. Let him go. I ask you, is it the Defenses job to capture the enemy flag? That sounds stupid doesn't? It's just as stupid to have an O player turning tail and wasting time chasing and DM'ing the enemies O. You think you are stopping the enemy, but at the same time you are stopping your own teams O efforts, cause YOU are THE O. Thinking you have to kill anyone of the other color upon seeing them is a very naive and DM type attitude. You can tell a better player by the judicious use of their energies. I play Spy a lot, and it is a better spy that will pass up an easy backstab on a sniper on the enemies battlements so as to not have to waste time redisguising and, if the D is smart, alerting them by the kill icon in the upper right. It's better to pick and chose your targets wisely. This is NOT DM, you do not HAVE to kill every enemy insight, in fact there are many times you shouldn't.

Now, Chasing is not so much an issue in a well balanced game. Don't get me wrong, it's still lame, but it's less of a problem if things are fair. When chasing becomes downright insulting is when, let's say Blues team has that almost all D team, and their O insists on chasing. Now, I've been on tons of games where even without chasing we were NOT even getting touches on the flag, much less flag movement and certainly not flag captures. But then the offense felt the need to chase on top of that?! Give me a break. That creates a ridiculous stalemate that cannot be fun for anyone involved. 7 D guys splitting up the morsels of a couple of O guys every minute or so, and their O isn't capping either since their DM'ing everything that moves. That is not TFC the way Valve intended it, I assure you. That's a weak watered down version. Play a game with 5/D 4/0 that are doing their job properly and there is no comparison.

To you guys insistent on playing D only, get out a bit more. Play some O. Give it a fair shot, and see if after a week or so you don't feel more fulfilled and better rounded. If you are O, stick to your job and let the other (usually and unfortunately) 6 or 7 guys in your base do theirs. You'll both be better off. And for Gods sake, let the Capping begin!!

You can discuss the editorial here ...

Wednesday, 11 July 2001 1100Z
A new warrior joins the Fort... -Teatime

Big woot!
I'm honoured and pleased to welcome another proud warrior to the Fort, one I was looking forward to join us for quite a while now. So, a big welcome to 12PackAttack!

Not only he is one hell of a TFC player and without doubt one of the meanest demomen in TFC, but for all the time I know him now (almost 2 years) he has always shown respect for the game and the people playing it. The fact that he is a very skilled player has never compromised his sportsmanship and has never kept him from caring about the people he's playing with.

So, without further ado let us move to his first editorial on the Fort.

Sunday, 08 July 2001 1330Z
Some clarifications... -Teatime

Sigh, some people tried their best to misunderstand my latest editorial. But what can you expect from a community which discusses respawn camping as if they had never seen a lame demo hanging around the enemy resupply exclusively for kills ...

Of course most of the issues I described in my editorial are by no means new.
It's quite logical that many people who started playing this game with TFC have few insight into the history of TF. But the gap in understanding the history and development of TF/C is growing larger. The newer players not only have no idea what the original TF had been through, but they also know little about the roots of TFC. Many people discussing the HWG today know little about how pale in comparison this class was before TF1.5 (which in fact made him so strong Valve toned him down a bit later). Can those people really evaluate the sniper without knowing how ineffective he was pre-TF1.5 (unless in the hands of really good snipers), but that the sniper was a feared class in QWTF in a way which is hard to imagine even today?

The overstressing of skill or a winning-at-all-cost attitude have of course been present in the times before the TF 1-5 patch and will have plagued the old TF as well. Don't think I'm trying to fool you into believing the old TFC or TF community would have been an intact world with everybody being role models. The change I spot is not the upcoming of this attitude but I feel it's growing and spreading through the community (and I'm sure it's in no way restricted to TFC but becoming a general problem in all kind of games).
By no means I intend to apply to each 'new' player that attitude. There are a lot of good people amongst them, without any doubt. Oh, while we're at that point: With 'new' I don't mean newbies (you should know me better by now)! I expect little from someone who has just entered the game and the community and who has still so much to learn about the game and the way to play it. Somebody moving to TFC from a deathmatch-game will likely need some time to adjust and to realize that TFC requires a different approach and attitude. But as soon as somebody's past the initial phase of getting to know TFC he should in fact adjust to the game, and then I (or anybody else for that matter) feel entitled to question and criticize the attitude he's showing.
So 'new' is merely an expression to separate - quite crudely - the post-TF1.5 generation from the one pre-TF1.5. But let me stress this again: This distinction is not intended to lump together all 'new' players as the bad folks and glorifying the 'old' players as the good guys. Take it as you would take a statistic saying there would be an increase of small criminality amongst the 15-20 years old.

Friday, 06 July 2001 1015Z
Footnotes and recommended reading -PainKilleR-[CE]

I was skimming through Teatime's editorial, and decided to give some footnotes for you all. Some of it is for the sake of understanding the history of this game, and some is just to learn more about the game itself. For anyone that hasn't played the original TF for Quake, I highly recommend finding a copy of Quake (I recently picked up a boxed full-version Quake CD at my local nation-wide software chain for $6 to replace a broken CD), and just giving it a run, to get a hang of what it took to get into a game of TF in the first place, and also to get a look at what over 700 people were doing at a time when the last big hit online game had had 300 players. It's akin to comparing the number of people that play CS to the number of people that play Quake 2 Red Rover (fun mod btw ;p )

Also, some of this information is still pertinent to HL and TFC. In fact, reading through one of these files, I found the script that eventually became the 'detscript' which revealed a bug in the demoman's pipe detonation delay in TFC. The files are as follows: TF2.8 Readme.txt file (yeah, 2.8 was the last client version of TF before TFC came along), TF Versions change history, and the Quake Tech Info help file. The first two files came in the TF2.8 client download, the 3rd came in one of the patches for Quake.

Anyway, just thought I'd share, since I had this stuff sitting on my hard drive anyway. I was one of those 700 people playing QWTF for a while, and then, as much as now, I often took time away to do something else from time to time, but TF's a hard one to shake off. There's something to be said about smaller communities in online gaming, you're more accountable for your actions because everyone knows everyone else. I really started paying a lot more attention to the way I play when I started recognizing the people I was playing the game with, and even moreso when they started recognizing me. On top of that, if someone asks a question, and you know the answer, it takes a lot less time to answer the question and go on with the game than to chide the person for not knowing something that you probably had to ask about as well. It's not the new players destroying the game, so much as the somewhat older players not helping the new players. The gap in skill that a script can make up for is so minute that it's laughable that people would go to such great lengths to protect it. The things that matter: how you move, the weapons you choose to use, the timing of your approach on an enemy, the way you work with your teammates, the way you communicate, can not be made up for with a script, and if you can't stand out above the newbie on the basis of those points alone, then who are you to chastise and chide the newbie for asking?

Wednesday, 04 July 2001 1700Z
TFC Community - The Next Generation... -Teatime

Okay, this one has occupied my mind quite some time now.

Watching the TFC Community I believe that this community has changed very clearly compared to the beginnings 2 years ago. Well, why should it not? 2 years is a lot of time, especially in the fast world of online gaming. Yet I'm rather concerned about the changes I think have taken place, and are still taking place in the community.

So not to cause any confusion:
I'm talking of the community here, not the game. While - of course - the general attitude and approach is influencing the game the changes I will talk about are not having any extraordinary impact on the games, especially the pub games. Those are basically as good or as bad as they ever were. Which is sad enough, as one would imagine that after 2 years TFC the general quality of gameplay should have improved noticeably even in pub games. Yet all I can see is an improvement in skill (though not as much as one would imagine), but the gameplay has not improved one bit!

So what changes am I talking about?

Let's start with marking a point around which I believe many of these changes started: The 1.1.0.0 patch (aka TF 1.5). With that I don't say the patch is to blame for the changes I will describe in the following, but to some of these changes it clearly acted as a catalyst. IMO it coincidentally marks the time of CS becoming the most popular game (which star had started to rise some time before the 1.1.0.0 patch was released).
And of course there are factors completely unrelated to the game itself which are having an increasing impact on the community.

I see the following factors responsible for the changes of the community:

- The change of the game itself

The major impact - as mentioned - took place with the 1.1.0.0 patch. It implemented the very controversial new netcode, it changed conc-jumping and the previous 1.0.1.6 patch had decreased, most noticeably, the max-number of mirvs for the demo and the HWG.
Not surprisingly this caused a huge rift in the TFC community, with many people leaving the game either for other TF MOD's (like the popular Q3F, which had even before attracted a lot of people for being closer to the original TF) or moving to other games.
That patch driving away a lot of veterans from the QWTF days as well as early TFC'er was kind of a bloodloss to the community. With those people the community not only lost good and skilled people, but also lost some invaluable 'experience' and 'perspective'. It took from the community people capable of acting as examples to imprint/influence the coming TFC generations

- Changes and occurrences related to the game

Most noticeably the increasing number of other HL-MODs attracting more and more people, like FLF, DOD, Firearms and of course CS.
With HL being the largest platform for MODs on the net it's inevitable that people switch between games and a game like TFC is having a much harder time to consolidate itself than it would if it were a standalone game. This effect is just increased by the next factor:

- The constant influx of new players

The continuous remarketing of HL in various forms has helped Valve immensely to keep the game and many MODs alive, but on the downside that also meant that the constant influx of newbies were hampering the MODs to consolidate themselves.

- The dropping average age of gamers

This is just a logical development by spreading access to the internet, decreasing costs for computers and the increasing numbers of computers in general (like a kid 'inheriting' the old computer of its older brother/sister or parent when he/she buys a new one).

These are IMO the most important factors which - directly or indirectly - are influencing the community and are causing changes.

Having to deal with people either new to the game in the first place or coming from other MODs has - IMO - not only prevented a big deal to establish some basic set of 'rules', some kind of 'code of conduct', but rather quite the opposite just caused any 'rules' to be questioned and undermined constantly.

Many of these people are coming from a different background of gaming.
I guess many of those newer players (though a lot of 'older' players as well) have probably played a lot on console games prior to online games. IMO there are two points worth mentioning about console games:
1) They are not customizable. The controls are predefined and cannot be changed in any way.
2) In most console games 'skill' is the key to win. To earn a good score a player has to master the controls and to train his reflexes. Lesser skills often means an inferior player.
I could be wrong, but both points seem to play an increasingly significant role in the attitude of people and the game-related discussions led.

There is an increasing aversion against the script language, with arguments ranging from 'cheap' and 'skilless' up to plain 'cheating'.
Left aside that the accusation of 'cheating' in the vast majority of cases is just silly and only shows the lack of understanding for the game's history and basics, I suspect that many of these people feel uncomfortable with scripts because they think it blurs the level of competition and distorts the showing of skill.
In a console game the greater skill (and perhaps cleverness) will decide the game. In TFC the script language - effectively used - can even up for some lack of skill. Communication binds can increase the teamwork (and therefore increase the efficiency of each player), gren timers help a great deal in using grens more effectively, rocketjump-scripts can even help a newbie to perform those jumps, etc.
Some people for example are very eager to condemn the use of RJ-scripts. They feel a RJ should just be possible by having exercised and mastered it manually. The flaw in logic is that when you accept rocketjumping in general the way it is performed is of no consequence. If a player can RJ to 2fort's battlements than it is irrelevant for the game if this jump was performed manually or by a script. You cannot call the first valid and condemn the second.
What actually annoys those people is that fact that a script like the RJ-script makes it harder for them to show off, to shine with their l33t skills. They want not only to be more skilled than other players, they want it to be as visible as possible. Get a grip people!
I wonder how many people would be pissed off if there were really a working and useful cjump-script …

'Skill' has always played an important role in games like TFC. Without argue it is one of the pillars to become any successful and efficient in this game (another pillar, for example, is experience).
However, in a teamgame like TFC the importance of skill - and its constant celebration in chats and forums - often enough shows its downside when people are more concerned about showing their skill in various ways than caring for the game or their team. This, of course, is primarily a problem on the pubs, with people deathmatching, not coordinating the classes and positions of the team at all, etc.
The problem is that 'skill' seems to be easier to define as 'effort' or 'effective teamwork'. All discussions about the personal score often enough prove that point.
While this attitude have been prevalent before, I think it has become only worse. People define themselves more and more over their 'skills'. The bad thing about it that it - still - prevents people from fully realizing the team aspect of the game.

Why are pub games so terrible? While newbies and lamers do stand out more clearly in a pub game their part in a game failing is usually very small. Most games are terrible because (more or less) experienced people refuse to play the game properly and rather care about showing their skill or having some cheap way of fun.
Don't get me wrong: As I initially said I acknowledge the importance of skill, but IMO the importance of teamwork in TFC is far greater than any individual skill.
But as it is many players don't enter TFC with the right mindset for teamwork. And with the constant stressing and bragging of personal skill (and this sad joke called 'personal score') the community only moves further away from being able to create such a mindset.
Of course things are completely different in the world of clan matches. But I wonder how many people consider playing in a clan primarily as an object of prestige and a mean to show off their skills on a more competitive level.

Which seaminglessly leads to the next point: Winning at all cost.
Not a new phenomenon, either. Yet an attitude spreading significantly in the last few months.
In pub games, with the general lack of teamwork, this usually shows in the employment and justification of basically each kind of tactic, regardless of the nature of the tactic and the circumstances.
Now, respawn camping, chasing, all-D games, etc are neither new nor uncommon (though I think all-D games were more rare before TF 1.5), and such tactics have been discussed for ages.
However, it seems to me that each time these discussions come up more and more people are joining the "the end justifies the means"-attitude. It's getting harder each time to explain why certain tactics should not be employed on pub games (or at least not excessively).
People more and more seems to define 'fun' as 'victory', and are happily willing to sacrifice the fun of others to achieve this victory.
The arguments to support this attitude is long and various, starting from the silly 'everything's fair in war'-argument (last time I checked this was still a game, not a war) and stopping with the accusation of people arguing against certain tactics being "skilless whiners" (hmm, 'skill', here we go again).
When will those people realize that the experience of a pub game is more important than the result?
Nobody will remember that Team Blue won a round on 2fort two months ago on server ABC. But people remember a game being fun (or being terrible) or a game being a challenge (regardless of the outcome).

And when will people realize how dangerous this line of thinking is?
If the end justifies the means, why should people refrain from using cheats? For the time being there's still a concurrence to condemn cheating. But the more the community rules victory over conduct the less plausible arguing against cheating becomes.
But then again parts of the 'skill'-faction still lives under the delusion only 'skilless' player would cheat and cheats would be useless against skilled players. Guess those people have never seen the demo-movies on wallhacks over at Punkbuster.
Remember: You reap as you sow …

Stay put, I'm not done yet!

Most people who entered the game post-TF1.5 lack an understanding for the history of the game. They've entered the game conceiving it as a static setup (with some new maps now and then and occasionally some new features, like the new models or, soon, voice communication), ignorant of the long and twisted line of development and changes in TF. Those who started playing TFC before TF1.5 have experienced the larger changes taking place, but only the veterans of the old TF were witnesses of the original struggle to create the different features and the initial class balance. Mind me, I'm no TF veteran either, but I have been told enough stories of the different versions of TF, the different ways TFS tried to develop TF to know some of the history.
Why should this be important? Because it offers an understanding on the game's basics and the constant struggle to maintain or shift the class balance.
People claiming the HWG or the sniper were cheap classes obviously have no understanding of the class-system and the class-balance. That doesn't mean the HWG couldn't still use some adjustment, but it's the purpose of the HWG to be a deadly force.
Learning about the changes in the different classes in TF (but also the more recent tweaking in TFC) shows very nicely the importance of class balance.
As TF 1.5 is one year old we have plenty of people in the community knowing TFC just the way it was afterwards. Consequently I feel that many of those people are offering rather unqualified opinions about the game's basics, in which they don't have the sufficient understanding (but that is, of course, no prerogative of the newer players, there are longtime players showing such ignorance as well).

Interestingly enough the most controversial topic of the last few months shows most of the problem very nicely: Bunnyhopping.

- It requires skill, so those who've mastered it feel l33t and are admired by a lot of people
- It is quite effective and therefore justified and defended against all accusations
- Justifying it as a valid 'movement technique' shows a complete disrespect for the class balance

(And yes, I am disappointed that Valve seems to have BH and related techniques just toned down instead of removing it completely. Though I will wait for the patch to be released for a final judgment).

In closing:
I don't like one bit where the community and its general attitude is heading.
I don't know if the community would be any better if there had never been a TF1.5, no 'Half-Life Generation' and no other MODs. And of course it's moot to speculate on that.
Skill and victory seems to become the gods to pray to, reducing fun and joy to minor values and rendering terms like fairness and sportsmanship to antiquated relics.
But even if you feel comfortable with that, do you really think it improves the game and the community?
Take a close look on everything you dislike on the game and the community and ask yourselves, if you are not perhaps a part of the problem as well.

You can discuss this article here on the PlanetFortress forums.

Wednesday, 04 July 2001 1420Z
Fourth of July Salute... -Totentanz

To all too many people, the Fourth of July is merely a day off work, to have picnics and cookouts with families, and then to go see fireworks that evening. It's been forgotten - in many people's opinions - what this day is TRULY about. A day when a group of men decided they didn't like what their government was doing, and chose to become patriots, to try to make a better future for themselves and their loved ones. Many of these sacrificed their livelihoods and lives in this cause. And since then, there have been other patriots doing the same - fighting for the ideals the founding fathers of the USA set down, unswerving in their faith and loyalty.

Mind you, patriotism isn't anything that America has a monopoly on - other countries have their patriots as well. However, in my case, being an American, and a veteran of the US Army - all I'm personally familiar with is those that were Americans. If any of you readers out there would be willing to share accounts of patriots of other countries, please email me with any information, URLs, etc - I'm nothing if openminded, and living in various other countries in my time in the Army opened my eyes to the values and history of other countries in the world.

So, today's tribute I got from the American Legion homepage - an account of the determination, patriotism and loyalty of an American Serviceman in the Vietnam war.

Today, our Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines and CoastGuardsmen continue a bond with patriots before them: Protecting the common cause of America - a cause of freedom and human rights for themselves and their families. One such patriot is Army Special Forces Capt. Humbert "Rocky" Versace (Ver-sach-ee).. Rocky was a trimly built, twenty-six year-old West Point graduate. He was serving a six-month extension in Vietnam as a military intelligence adviser. His slightly out-thrust jaw and penetrating eyes were indications of his personality, but his close-cut, black-flecked, steel-gray hair looked as if it belonged on someone much older.

The most notable quality that Rocky displayed was a dynamic, outspoken frankness. He had an eagerness and disregard for danger. Those who knew him said it was a matter of liking Rocky a heck of a lot or disliking him intensely. He was too positive a personality to allow any other reactions and his unreserved observations could be quite abrasive. Rocky was obsessed with the idea of duty, honor, country, and was so dedicated to his nation as to be considered "different." The old Army term "Gung Ho" fit perfectly. No one worked harder or more diligently than he. There was even a sense among Rocky's comrades that one day Rocky would run into difficulty if he wasn't careful. He was so eager to accomplish his mission, it was bound to get him into trouble sooner or later. Rocky and his comrades ran into that trouble only two weeks before his six-month extension was complete.

On Oct. 28, 1963, on a raid near the Viet Cong-infested U-Minh forest, Rocky's team was overrun by a numerically superior force. His team was forced to withdraw. Rocky had taken three bullets in his leg. His wounds were pumping blood like a fire hydrant. Rocky wanted to charge out with the seven rounds he had left in his carbine and get that many more shots off at the Viet Cong. His comrades held him down long enough to bandage his leg. A second after the last bandage was applied, Rocky and his team were captured.

Rocky was the ranking member of his captured squad, and the Viet Cong tried for nearly two years to break him. They isolated him. They kept him in shackles and irons. They cut his daily rice rations in half. They twisted and beat his infected leg. Despite his pain and suffering, Rocky remained indignant. The harder the Viet Cong pushed, the wider Rocky's defiant smile would become. Fluent in French, Vietnamese and English, Rocky could argue with three different prison guards at the same time. He challenged their propaganda to no end, regardless of the punishment he incurred. The Viet Cong sought to use Captain Versace as an example to the local villagers that the United States was not invincible. They periodically paraded Rocky around from hut to hut, a rope around his neck and shackles on his hands and ankles. The plan failed. The villagers told other Americans that this prisoner not only resisted the Viet Cong attempts to get him to admit war crimes and aggression, but in their own language, he would verbally counter their assertions convincingly and in a loud voice so the local villagers could hear. The local rice farmers were surprised at his strength of character and his unwavering commitment to God and the United States.

Finally, the Viet Cong gave up on Rocky. The last time that any of his fellow prisoners heard from him, Rocky was singing "God Bless America" at the top of his lungs from his isolation box. Realizing they could not break his spirit, they killed him. On September 29, 1965 the National Liberation Front announced that they had executed Captain Versace. Rocky died without ever forsaking or forgetting the ideals set forth by our founding fathers

Patriotism, loyalty and dedication - values people around the world can - and should - respect. Even though that July 4th is the day that America celebrates, I ask all of you readers to take a moment to think about and offer thanks to patriots and heroes of your country - wherever in the world you may be. They made sacrifices so that you can continue to have what you do, and all too often what do they get in return for it? Being forgotten in a world where accumulation of material wealth has become the highest priority in all too many people's lives. So taking less than a minute out of your life to remember and give thanks to patriots and heroes isn't too much to ask - I'm not asking you to make the same sacrifices they did - only asking that you do a little bit to not let their memory die.

As usual, today's tribute is dedicated to Bundy, an American patriot and one of my personal heroes. My friend, I thank you for all that you gave to this country of our's.