South Vietnam police chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan (left) executes a man suspected of being  a Viet Kong officer.

Edward Donald Slovik (above) was a private in the U.S Army during World War ll and the only American soldier to be court-martialled and executed for desertion since the Civil War.

Over 21,000 American soldiers were given varying sentences for desertion during World War II, including 49 death sentences,but Slovik’s was the only death sentence carried out.

Slovik’s execution was the basis for a 1954 book by William Bradford Huie.The book was adapted for a TV movie in 1974 starring Martin Sheen and also called The Execution of Private Slovik.

Alan Alda ,an actor, director and screenwriter is a five-time Emmy Award and six-time Golden Globe Award winner. He is best known for his role as Hawkeye Pierce ( above)
in the TV series M*A*S*H on CBS from September 17, 1972 to February 28, 1983. He was nominated for 21 Emmy Awards, and won five. He took part in writing 19 episodes, including the finale, and directed 32. He is currently a Visiting Professor at the Stony Brook University School of Journalism.

Alda as U.S. Republican Senator Arnold Vinick in West Wing on NBC-TV
from 1999 to 2006

Alan Alda played  U.S. Senator Owen Brewster (above) in The Aviator
in 2004. He received his first  Academy Award nomination for the role. 

Space Shuttle Challenger  was NASA’s second Space Shuttle orbiter to be put into service, Columbia being the first. Its maiden flight was on April 4, 1983, and it completed nine missions before breaking apart 73 seconds after the launch of its tenth mission, on January 28, 1986, resulting in the death of all seven crew members. The break up was ultimately due to the failure of an O-ring on its right solid-fuel rocket booster (SRB). The failure was due to a variety of factors, including unusually low temperatures prior to liftoff.

The accident led to a two-and-a-half year grounding of the shuttle fleet. The  missions resumed in 1988 with the launch of Space Shuttle Discovery.

    
                                                 The Challenger crew

   
                                                

             Challenger memorial at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia

General Douglas MacArthur  was a Chief of Staff of the United States Army during
the 1930s and played a prominent role in the Pacific theater during World War ll. He received the Medal of Honor for his service in the Philippines Campaign. He was one
of only five men ever to rise to the rank of five-star general in the U.S. Army, and the 
only man ever to become a field marshal in the Philippine Army. MacArthur died on 
April 5, 1964 of liver disease. He was 84 years old.

            
          General MacArthur(center)returning to the Philippines as he had promised