<p>61th Anniversary of D-Day, June 5-7. </p>
<p>My manager’s father, D-Day medic. Family acquaintance of 55 years, D-Day nurse.</p>
<p>My father was in the 2nd plane if paratroopers that jumped into Normandy on D-Day. He also survived the Battle of the Bulge, Pearl Harbor and Operation Market Garden. He’ll be 91 this summer.</p>
<p>I understand why you think that WWW II was “The Good War”. But wars are based on lies; there are no “good” wars. Problem - Reaction - Solution is the classic method for those who set the Agenda to create conflict. Everyone over the age of 12 should be required to read Major General Smedley Butler’s eye-opening tome “War is a Racket!” [WAR</a> IS A RACKET - Major General Smedley D. Butler - USMC Retired](<a href=“http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm]WAR”>http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm)</p>
<p>^How would you have resolved the situation?</p>
<p>How?</p>
<p>The answer should be obvious…once you read the book.</p>
<p>Being married to a Marine aviator, I’m familiar with General Butler and not all suprised by his book. After all he was known as the “The Fighting Quaker.”</p>
<p>I strongly disagree that there are no good wars. I don’t mean “good” in the happy, lucky go sense but rather than some wars changed the course of human history for the good.</p>
<p>I have a friend who was a nurse in WWII, following right behind the troops on D-Day. I hold them all in my heart with deep gratitude.</p>
<p>I’m studying for the first part of my medical licensing exam, so if you could just give me the gist of it? Assuming Hitler had already risen to power and mobilized Germany’s army, what is the solution?</p>
<p>I agree that there are no truly good wars, but sometimes there are necessary wars. WWII was a necessary war.</p>
<p>
And let’s not forget about Japan and others.</p>
<p>My farther and uncles were all in the war. One uncle was in the 101st Airborne Division from its inception and he jumped into Normandy the night before D-Day. He also glided into Holland for Market Garden and he was at Bastogne when it was besieged. In the late '80’s I remember him saying about the film A Bridge Too Far; **“Now they’ve made ALL my movies.” **</p>
<p>I should have attributed the Title, ** The Good War**, to Studs Terkel, 1985 Pulitzer NonFiction winner for said book.</p>
<p>toblin, I read once about a WWII vet who was asked if he saw the movie “Battle of the Buldge”. His reply, “Naw, I saw the play”</p>
<p>My dad was a radio operator aboard a C-46 cargo plane stationed in the Pacific. His first official assignment in the war was to carry beer to the troops in New Guinea. Naturally, his crew was the most popular in the squadron.</p>
<p>Toblin, maybe your uncle and my dad knew each other.</p>
<p>My father wanted to join the Navy but they wouldn’t take him: he was too old. The Army finally took him. He did boot camp and OT camp. He trained the red ballers on the east coast, then got sent off because he had petroleum experience and worked for Ike on the run up to D-Day and entered France 11 days after the event to secure petroleum for the troops. In Paris on VE Day, spent time in Germany, took a bullet somewhere out in some forest, prevented Patton from getting his petroleum over some troops who were trapped and at risk, and I know these stories and many others because before he died and when he waited in many doctors’ offices he told me stories, over and over again. It was also in my growing up. Good War? No war is good. Did the experience change his life? Yes. Did it change mine and how I see things? I think so. What is that expression “Those who forget the past are forced to relive it.” I think that is why they are over there now, visiting the camps, the battle sites. If you really talk to those who were there, there is a lot of guilt for friends lost, for the horrors of what happens in war, for having to do something that you really would rather not do but you are doing it because you can’t not, things that you did that you feel were right and things you feel were wrong. For my father and for all of them who had never really travelled not like we do now and lived simple lives, coming out of the depression, being thrown together with rich scions from back east, farm kids from Kansas, generals and dukes all eating on the ground together, it was a different time.</p>
<p>my grandpa was a Chief Petty Officer on the Arizona. Got transfered to another ship in one of those “throw your duffel bag aboard the transfer boat and go” things just before Pearl Harbor. Left Honolulu on a fast track to another ship. Family lore is that his coffee pot went down with the ship.</p>
<p>My dad fought in the Pacific. He was part of a B-17 crew stationed in the Phillipines. Their base got bombed and planes destroyed on the first day of the war -a few hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor. He fought with the infantry for some months afterward. He was eventually wounded and then captured when the field hospital he was in was overrun by the advancing Japanese. </p>
<p>He spent the next 3 1/2 years rotting in POW camps in Japan. He spent some of the later years of the war trying to avoid getting killed by American air raid “friendly fire.” He said an attack by B-29s was terrifying because they flew so high that you couldn’t see or hear them coming and thus were almost always taken by surprise.</p>
<p>They were all starved and abused in the prison camps. Many died. When he was freed he had lost all his teeth and he weighed less than 100 lbs (at 6 ft. tall).</p>
<p>My Grandpa was part of the Marine Construction Battalion taken prisoner on Wake Island in the Philippines at the beginning of the war in the Pacific.</p>
<p>My dad was a machinest on an LST (Landing Ship, Tank) in the South Pacific. That man could make anything from anything. He never threw away any metal thing because he always knew it might be useful. That generation acquired a vast amount of practical knowledge.</p>
<p>At the senior center where I work, one of the high points of our year is the special ceremony we hold each November 11th for our veterans. We have vets from WWII, Korea, Viet Nam (yup, some of them are seniors now), and peacetime. Several of the guys landed at Normandy - I know it’s uppermost in their thoughts today. </p>
<p>I can’t quite express the respect and affection I feel for these dear men. Once we asked each vet to stand up and say a few words about which branch of the military he’d served in, and where - the breadth of their service in WWII was astonishing. From the Aleutians to the Sahara to Italy to Iwo Jima - 40 or so guys from our small town had truly covered the globe. We treasure the photos of themselves in uniform that they’ve shared with us (and talk about handsome).</p>
<p>Our favorite senior is a Marine who marked his 20th birthday during the Iwo Jima landing - he was a radio operator. His wife tells us that he still can’t talk about the horrible things he saw during the battle, and that he becomes very withdrawn on its anniversary even more than 60 years later. I wish all the veterans today health and peace, and I thank them for their courage and service.</p>
<p>One Veterans Day I checked a guy in for lunch and said, as I said to all of them, “Thank you for your service.” And he replied, “Well, thank you for my college education!” :)</p>