Nobody’s Hero: 9 Inconvenient Truths about Che Guevara

I've got a story about Che, SGT (Join to see)!

"Major Ralph 'Pappy' Shelton, who died at age 80 (29JUL10), was the American [Army Special Forces] officer who trained the Bolivian troops that captured Che Guevara in 1967. Together with 16 Spanish-speaking US officers, Shelton set up a training camp in eastern Bolivia in April 1967 to teach a battalion of 400 Bolivian conscripts the techniques of counter-guerrilla warfare. When their training ended in mid-September, they were transferred to the guerrilla zone, and two weeks later, on 8 October, surrounded Guevara's guerrilla band. Guevara himself was wounded and captured, and executed on 9 October. Shelton slipped out of the country on the following day and returned to his headquarters in the Panama Canal Zone.
'We had a job to do and we did it,' Shelton said last year (2009). 'The people of Bolivia wanted Guevara gone and asked for help, and we were glad to give it. That man is famous now, but he killed lots of innocent people and we were glad to help put him out of business.'"


Ralph Shelton and my wife taught at Kingsbury High School in Memphis, TN in the mid-seventies. Ralph headed up the JROTC program and he selected her to be the program sponsor. In 1979, when my wife and I met and married, she told me about Ralph. Ralph and I had the opportunity to meet a number of times, and once he even gave me an autographed copy of the True magazine article that described his experiences in Bolivia.
He was a kind, gentle and soft spoken man, and you'd never know through casual conversation that you were speaking to one of the U.S. Army's greatest Special Forces officers. He was highly decorated and was the recipient of many valor awards.
I am glad that I got to meet and know this extraordinary man. He is missed. Requiescat in pace. 1SG(P) (Join to see) MSG Dan Castaneda LTC Stephen F. CPT (Join to see)

Hey... they could go back to waving around "Quotations from Chairman Mao"...

Ignorance is bliss... these morons are ecstatic.

I pretty much go with the lack of knowledge idea. Heck the parents of half of the kids you see wearing them weren't born in 1967 and from what I've seen of our education system, history of Che isn't in the syllabus.