Jack Murtha
Jack Murtha the Democratic Congressman has died at the age of 77.
Murtha passed away from complications from gall bladder surgery.
A native of New Martinsville, West Virginia, in 1974, he was elected as part of the Democratic class of congressmen after the resignation in disgrace of President Nixon.
Murtha also had a fair amount of scandal during his own career, when he announced his opposition to the was in Iraq after enthusiastically voting for it only a year before, this move made him a liberal icon.
Murtha dies in the Virginia Hospital Center in Arlington, Va.,
Once a officer in the marine reserves before being elected, he became the first Vietnam War combat veteran to enter Congress.
Born in 1932, he delivered newspapers and worked in a gas station before graduating from Ramsay High School in Mount Pleasant.
His own great grandfather had served in the Civil War, his father and also three uncles in World War II, and his brothers in the Marine Corps, so Military service was in his blood.
He once wrote about his life saying,”Ever since I was a young boy, I had two goals in life-I wanted to be a colonel in the Marine Corps and a member of Congress,” this from his 2004 book, “From Vietnam to 9/11.