Recent newspaper articles regarding local Marines and friends of Corps.
Colonel Bucky Peterson, USMC (Retired)
MAKING A DIFFERENCE
ROUNDING UP TROOPS FOR STATE COLLEGES
Career Marine reaches out to military personnel about oportunities outside service
By Bob Norberg THE PRESS DEMOCRAT
September 4, 2006
Bucky Peterson, a career Marine officer whose last assignment was working on the transition team for the Iraqi government, is now leading a push to recruit military personnel for California colleges.
"They are a group of extraordinarily deserving men and women," said Peterson, Sonoma State University's interim vice president of development.
Peterson, 60, has been named by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to head the California Veterans Education Opportunity Partnership, better known as Troops to College.
It's an attempt to reach out to military personnel, educate them about the opportunities that are available when they leave the service, and remove any hurdles they may face.
"Let's keep them in California, give them an education in California, and get them into the California work force," Peterson said.
Peterson came up with the idea nine months ago during discussions about enrollment problems at Sonoma State, which didn't meet its target last year.
Patriotism aside, the military is a rich pool of potential students.
Today's all-volunteer military is made up of men and women with high school diplomas and clean records - and 160,000 service members are stationed in California.
Ninety-five percent of the personnel have $60,000 in Montgomery GI Bill educational benefits, but historically only half ever use them.
Of the 600,000 students at University of California and California State University campuses, only 4,000 are attending on GI benefits.
"Clearly, there is a significant number that are taking advantage of the benefits, but there is a greater opportunity to expand that base, and that is why we are doing this," said Brad Hayward, a spokesman for the UC system.
UC enrollment last year was up 1 percent, but only after the system at the last minute threw open its doors to new students.
The fallout was that six state universities, including Sonoma State, fell short of their enrollment targets. Sonoma State had 7,977 students in 2004 and fell to 7,749 students in 2005.
"Bucky, a Marine, came and joined the president's cabinet at a time we were talking a lot about enrollment management, and he came at that with military eyes and said, 'I know where there is an underserved population,' and he took the ball and ran with it," said Katharyn Crabbe, SSU's vice president of student affairs and enrollment management.
Crabbe said the first indication of whether the program is working will be in a year, when students start appearing on a list indicating an interest in attending a particular college even before they apply.
"It will be a couple of years before SSU will see much in actual people," Crabbe said. "I believe it is a case that most people who enlist in the military were not thinking about going to a four-year university while in high school, so they are probably headed to a community college initially to complete some work to be eligible."
Peterson, a Sonoma resident who is married with two grown children, spent 31 years in the military.
He retired in 1999 as a colonel and moved to Sonoma, where his wife's parents lived.
Peterson went to work doing planning and development for the Hanna Boys Center, a career that was interrupted twice by stints back in the Marines.
After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks; Peterson rejoined the Marines and worked in the central military command center in Tampa, Fla., during the war in Afghanistan.
For six months in 2003, Peterson was in Iraq as part of the team helping with the transition to an Iraqi government.
He landed the interim job as Sonoma State's chief fund-raiser 18 months ago.
"It was serendipity," Peterson said. "My son went here, and I thought he got a super education. I learned of this opportunity, and nice things happened."
Peterson took his idea for the outreach program to CSU Chancellor Charles Reed in Long Beach in February, and Reed personally took it to the governor's office.
Troops to College was formed in March, and ever since, Peterson has continued his SSU position while running the statewide task force, which is an unpaid volunteer position.
"He is frankly doing two jobs, but he sees progress, he likes that, he is helping lead the University of California, the community colleges and our 23 campuses," Reed said. "He is an asset to Sonoma State, and he is an asset to California."
BRIEF PROFILE OF BUCKY PETERSON
Age: 60
Job: Interim vice president of development at Sonoma State
Notable: Appointed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to head Troops to College, a program to encourage military personnel to attend California colleges.
Quote: "Let's keep them in California, give them an education in California, and get them into the California work force."
Photo was his fame - - his pride 'My Marines' The image of flag going up on Iwo Jima was extraordinary
By: Kevin Leary, Staff Writer
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
August 21, 2006
Retired Chronicle photographer Joe Rosenthal, who won the Pulitzer Prize and international acclaim for his soul-stirring picture of the World War II flag-raising on Iwo Jima, died Sunday in Novato.
Rosenthal, 94, retired from The Chronicle in 1981 after a distinguished 35-year career and many professional honors, but the flag-raising picture was his masterpiece for which he will always be remembered.
The Pulitzer Committee in 1945 described the photo as "depicting one of the war's great moments," a "frozen flash of history."
Rosenthal, born Oct. 9, 1911, in Washington, D.C., was found dead at about 10:45 a.m. in his bed at his home in the Atria Tamalpais Creek assisted living center.
He was a 33-year-old Associated Press photographer on Feb. 23, 1945, when he captured the black-and-white image of five battle-weary Marines and a Navy corpsman struggling to raise a flag atop Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima.
He took the picture on the fifth day of the furious 36-day battle that left 6,621 American dead and 19,217 wounded. All but 1,083 of the 22,000 dug-in Japanese defenders were killed before the island was secured.
It was of that battle -- one of the bloodiest in Marine Corps history -- that Adm. Chester Nimitz, World War II commander of the Pacific fleet, said: "Among the Americans who served on Iwo Island, uncommon valor was a common virtue."
Wartime Navy Secretary James Forrestal said of Rosenthal: "He was as gallant as the men going up that hill."
The photo was an instant classic and is the best-known combat photo of World War II, and perhaps the most famous photograph ever taken.
The image is still regarded as a symbol of the fighting spirit of the Marine Corps.
Even more than half a century later, Rosenthal's picture retains its emotional power as a work of art as well as a patriotic icon. It has been reproduced on postage stamps, calendars, newspapers, magazines and countless posters. The picture was used as an inspirational symbol for a War Bond drive in 1945 that raised $26.3 billion.
The flag-raising picture was the model for the gigantic bronze Marine Corps Memorial in Arlington, Va., which stands 110 feet tall from base to flag top and weighs more than 100 tons.
The photo was so dramatic and perfectly composed that some believed Rosenthal must have posed the figures.
"No," Rosenthal told a friend in recent years. "It was not posed. I gave no signal and didn't set it up. I just got every break a photographer could have wished for. If I set it up I probably would have ruined the shot. I was lucky."
But it was the luck of a fearless photographer who went into the thick of battle "to get where the action is, where pictures happen themselves, and all I had to do is point the camera," as he said, with typical modesty.
Unable to serve in the military because of bad eyesight that plagued him until his death, Rosenthal shot World War II as a combat photographer, first with the merchant marine and later as an Associated Press correspondent.
Few veterans of the war saw as much action, close-up, as Rosenthal. He crossed the North Atlantic in a convoy of Liberty ships that was attacked by German U-boats. He was in London during the Blitz.
He photographed Gen. Douglas MacArthur's Army fighting in the jungles of New Guinea. He cruised into battle in the South Pacific aboard a cruiser, a battleship and an aircraft carrier. He flew with Navy dive-bombers attacking enemy targets in the Japanese-occupied Philippines.
He hit the beaches with the first waves of Marines landing under fire on the islands of Guam, Peleliu, Angaur and Iwo Jima.
In Colliers Magazine 10 years later, Rosenthal wrote of going ashore on Iwo Jima with "those kids looking at me. It was grim. I stuck my index fingers up in front of my glasses and moved them like windshield wipers as if to clear the spray. The kids smiled, and then we ducked our heads and the boat beached."
When the Marines assaulted the sulfurous island on Feb. 19, 1945, Rosenthal was among the first ashore. "The situation was impossible," he recalled years later. "No man who survived the beach can tell you how he did it. It was like walking through rain and not getting wet."
When Rosenthal and a squad of Marines climbed to the top of Mount Suribachi on the fifth day of fighting, he was disappointed to find a small American flag already flying over the 546-foot volcano's summit.
He missed the picture of the first flag-raising a few hours earlier, but then he saw five Marines and a corpsman hoisting another, larger flag that could be seen all over the 7 1/2-square-mile island.
It was that flag-raising, caught at high noon in 1/400 of a second, that electrified the nation and won the Pulitzer Prize for photography in 1945.
After the war, Rosenthal returned to work for the Associated Press as a heroic celebrity, a role that embarrassed him. He often said that the real heroes were the young men he called "my Marines," who fought and died on Iwo Jima, and that he was just a newsman with a camera.
"I took the picture," he said. "The Marines took Iwo Jima."
In January of 1946, he joined The Chronicle. "My intention was to be here for a couple or several years, and then go on to some other place. I stayed for 35 years."
Rosenthal made little money from the Iwo Jima picture. He received a $4,200 bonus in war bonds from the AP, a $1,000 photography prize from a camera magazine and about $700 for a couple of radio appearances.
Altogether, Rosenthal reckoned he made less than $10,000 from the picture.
"And I was gratified to get that," he said in a 1995 interview. "Every once in a while someone teases me that I could have been rich. But I'm alive. A lot of the men who were there are not. And a lot of them were badly wounded. I was not. And so I don't have the feeling someone owes me for this."
For many years, Rosenthal was a familiar figure around San Francisco as a news photographer and as a popular and respected member of North Beach's close-knit community.
