WSU criminologist and fatigue research Bryan Vila explains his Deadly Force Judgment and Decision Making Simulator, which he hopes can give a clearer view of how tired police react in dangerous situations.
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When he learned about a job training police in the Pacific islands of Micronesia in 1978, former Los Angeles police officer Bryan Vila seized the opportunity to work in paradise. Little did he know that the hard lessons of teaching police officers from 2,000 different islands over six years would make him an expert on training in other cultures.
Vila, now a Washington State University professor of criminal justice and criminology at the Spokane campus, had been a Marine in Vietnam as well as a member of the sheriff’s department in Los Angeles, when he landed with a bang on an unpaved runway in Saipan.
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Kevin Carson ’81
Westholme Publishing, 2011
In his foreword to the latest account of the Nez Perce War of 1877, Kevin Carson ’81 writes, “In my memory, there was never a time when our family was not fascinated by the saga of the Nez Perce.” Carson’s great-great-great grandfather, Levi Watrous, served as a scout during the Civil War, then moved to Columbia County, Washington, in 1872, where he made his living as a stockman. … » More …
In March of this year, a special Congressional action signed by President Obama awarded the Congressional Gold Medal to the Women Airforce Service Pilots, the “WASPS” of World War II. Jeanne Lewellen Norbeck ’33 was awarded the medal posthumously.
Jeanne graduated from Washington State College with a degree in English. President Roosevelt had funded the start of construction on the Grand Coulee Dam, and Jeanne was an early hire. She married a young engineer on the project, Ed Norbeck.
Later, Jeanne and Ed became managers of a large plantation in one of the outer islands in the Hawaiian chain. Given … » More …
During one of the nation’s many wars, I wrote of a patrol that came under fire and killed an enemy soldier. Before continuing, the GIs cut off the dead man’s genitals, and forced them into his mouth, leaving also a playing card-Ace of Spades-on his body. The soldiers said that such were enemy superstitions, that they would not cross over a dead man so festooned, thus it was required to keep the other side effectively tethered if the patrol was to complete its mission.
It was a poor excuse for … » More …
On February 2, 1991, during the first Iraq war, Capt. R. Dale Storr (’83 Mech. Engr.) was captured by Iraqi soldiers after his A-10 Thunderbolt was shot down near Kuwait. The 29-year-old Air Force pilot from Spokane was a prisoner of war for 33 days, spending a portion of that time in Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison, while his friends and family believed he had died in the plane crash. He was regularly beaten and interrogated by the secret police, but used techniques taught to him at the survival school at Fairchild Air Force Base to get through it.
Now a lieutenant colonel in the Washington … » More …
In 1945, the German occupation had Holland on its knees. The Dutch were starving, because the Germans were not supplying them with food. Adelderd Davids of Nijmegen, Holland, six years old at the time, lived in Rotterdam. “It was awful,” he recalls. “We ate tulip bulbs. Some people ate rats, because there was absolutely nothing. We had two or three potatoes for 10 people. Our mother would ask after dinner, ‘Who is still hungry? You can eat the peelings.’ On a feast day they made a torte out of the bulbs.”
England’s Royal Air Force and the United States 8th Air Force joined together to … » More …
The Office of Strategic Services, our country's first centralized intelligence agency, was formed during the Second World War to train men and women in the arts of sabotage and espionage and then to send them around the world to protect our nation's interests. Among the many Washington State College students and alumni who served in that conflict, five friends and classmates trained together in the OSS, then went to North Africa, Italy, England, and China to help win the war.
» More ...With three engines lost on a B-29 bombing run over Tokyo December 3, 1944, pilot Robert Goldsworthy and his crew bailed out. For the next nine months, he would endure brutal beatings as a Japanese prisoner of war. Far worse, he said, was the cold and starvation. Goldsworthy and his older brother, Harry E. Goldsworthy Jr., both flew World War II combat missions. They retired as Air Force generals with five stars between them. Their contributions to the war are among the 120 case studies chronicled in C. James Quann’s new book, WSU Military Veterans: Heroes and Legends. The author relates military experiences of former … » More …