……..so goes one of Winston Churchill’s magnificent quips, but that special old man hadn’t finished yet, adding:
AND TO HAVE BEEN MISSED!!!!
I am a child of the second world war. I and my buddies played war, our favorite game, especially in winter when we’d build Nazi bunkers, installaltions, bulwarks and such with ice and snow, and then bomb them with snowballs as we “Spitfires and Mustangs” were wont to do. We lived in Minnesota when winter was winter in those days.
We Americans won every battle.
I had two step uncles, Roy, age 19 and Dale, age 17, who had signed up for duty shortly after Christmas, 1941. Dale, the younger one lied about his age. Both joined the Navy and were eventually sent into the Pacific theater. When Dale came home from training that late winter, around February, when most Minnesotans finally hunker down indoors for basic survival, he came home on furlough before going overseas, in full navy uniform, the only clothing then in his possession.
Mother’s family was German. She loved all of the endless numbers of Germans related to her. She even spoke German when with them……But she wanted her distance being determined to be totally American.
Her own mother had died of cancer long before I was born. (Human adults were married for life in those days.) Grandpa Danner married “Grandma” Bertha also before I was born. She had around six kids, including the two boys raised by grandpa which made Dale and Roy somewhat a part of our larger family.
On furlough that first weekend home from training, Dale in full uniform took me and my older sister to the West Twins movie theater to see the war movie (on the European front), “Eagle Squadron”, starring Robert Stack as a war pilot. The place was packed….adults went to movies in those days.) The crowd responded as if he were the President…..and I were his kid.
My sister, thank God a girl, was rather puzzled over the scene. I don’t think she even knew what war was. She wasn’t interested in throwing snowballs at Nazi airfields that winter.
She loved playing dolls and paper dolls in her bedroom.
For that Christmas past I had received my first atlas….(already a war-time printing made out of flimsy cardboard, which despite all of my drawings of battle lines in Europe and the Philippines to Bataan in the Pacific, I still own to this day.
The war made me discover the World. Although dyslexic, I could read newspaper cutlines, even paragraphs and entire articles that winter especially when associated with war pictures.
I got a Bachelor’s degree at university in June, 1956. I joined the Army reserves….after getting D grades in ROTC there when a freshman. I went on active duty the following February at Fort Leonard Wood in south-central Missouri.
I wanted to know who I was as a human adult male. The WAR has a tremendous influence on me, I knew it even then.
What would I do when shot at…..and had been missed? I am positive this is in our male genetics…..”Would we ‘man-up?”, when needed?
Going overseas never happened for me……to this day, a disappointment….having been shot at…..and “having been missed”.
I was thinking foxhole fighting then…..Without doubt, I would NEVER have run for I would never have overcome the humiliation of being a coward, abandoning my buddies who were relying on me to help us all survive.
Today’s leftists are politically and morally too repulsive in their values to understand anything beyond selling the lie, that “There is NO DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE HUMAN MALE AND FEMALE ANIMAL except for socialization”……But, try to be Christian enough to forgive them for the evil they do.
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