new images, old images

[gurdonark]

My friend gregwest98 sent me an old digicam. It's immaculately boxed. Such a nice gift. I looked at it a bit; I can't wait to see if I can learn to use it properly.

I went tonight to check out his website about his dad's experiences in World War Two. I was struck by one of the stories set down on this page. War is not really fought by norse gods or Aegean epic heroes. War is fought by ordinary people, who have to risk their lives and then kill other people.

I asked my uncle, who was a tail gunner in a bomber which was shot down over Italy during WW II, what it was like to be downed in enemy territory. He told me "I was a young fellow, 'bout like you, didn't know nothin', 'bout like you, and we came down, and suddenly I was in the dark, and there was shooting and bomb blast and flashes all around, and I looked around me, and I said..... "DAMN!", because before I'd been up in the air, and I had never really known what it was like".

I'm thinking about folks doing difficult jobs in difficult places now. Much as I despise war, I'm grateful for folks like Greg's dad--ordinary people who just stepped up and did.

Comments

Link has changed

[gregwest98.livejournal.com]

As much as I hate this sort of thing, it is nevertheless the way life is: I've changed my Isp so that link should go dead at some point. I've moved Dad's WWII stuff to this link (http://members.cox.net/gregwest982).

Re: Link has changed

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

Don't worry, it'll be good practice for me with the "edit entry" and (less than sign) a href = "Greg's folly" (greater than sign) way in which we
do Livejournal links in the posts. I never understand why the comments take hyperlinks so easily, but you have to tag them in the posts, but I shouldn't say stuff like that out loud, because someone will explain to me, and I don't want to know.

we think of them as heros - but really they are just ordinary men

[yulbrynner.livejournal.com]

many of them made extraordinary by circumstances. I read Band of Brothers and thought - would I have ended up a hero like Dick Winters, or an ineffective leader like Lt. Norman Dyke. In the end, I am simply grateful that I never had the chance to find out. My father, a Vietnam vet and platoon leader, echoed these thoughts. "You don't need to worry about that stuff" he says.