Posted on 01/21/2019 6:56:42 PM PST by hole_n_one
Add Jack Posobiec. He’s great on twitter.
bttt
That's right !
The one thing I have noticed is that the likelihood of having seen combat is inversely proportionate to the likelihood of prostituting one’s military career for other purposes.
My grandfather, as I found out afterwards, was a genuine WW2 hero. Never breathed a word about any part of it except the occupation of Japan afterwards, and that only to the extent he needed to explain how he got all that Japanese stuff.
BUMP
Programmed by media.
Rosie O’Donnell has been unusually quiet.
A lot of his generation(like my dad) did not want to talk about their exploits. They did what they had to do.
My dad told me stories of making “jungle juice” in New Guinea. Of finding a sunken Chris Craft, repairing it and having it for one day before Douglas MacArthur saw them and confiscated it for his own use. He told me about meeting head hunters in New Guinea and finding a Japanese battleship miles up river in the jungle where the Japs ran it aground.
However, he never told me about how he got shot in the head or how he got all his upper teeth knocked out by a Japanese soldier or the details of how he got shot in the abdomen, got infected almost died and came back to the US on a hospital ship.
He did tell me that he was there when MacArthur walked on the water onto the beach at Luzon and said “I have returned”. He did say that they spent the morning clearing the bodies away of the Australian and US Marines that had gone in the previous two days. That he had to walk on bodies because the sand on the beach was covered with dead soldiers. That they brought in bulldozers dug a big pit and pushed all the dead Japs in there and buried them.
I have been a doctor since 1975 and I’ve had the privilege on occasion of crossing paths with veterans of serious combat in WW II.
It is very rare for such men to speak of their experiences. It is common for their children to find out what their father did in WW II after death, when an obituary or commemoration brings stories to light that no family member ever heard.
In 1998, I cared for a man who was then 86 years old. He had been admitted to the hospital with severe abdominal pain, the cause and the medical parts of the story aren’t important.
What is important is that he had not called the nurse to get pain medication all night, despite being in agony. As soon as I saw him, with his military haircut and a body which could have put on his uniform from 1944 with no problem, I thought I knew why.
I went back trailing an entourage of fellows, residents, interns, and nurses. “Tell them why you didn’t call anyone last night, when you were in so much pain”.
His answer (as I suspected): “Infantrymen only talk to infantrymen”.
I later got the story he buried from 1945 to 1998, maybe that will be the subject of another post.
But the point of THIS story is that the intense combat score is inversely proportional to the mouthing off about how great it was score, and I bet this has always been true, since war was invented.
Bkmrk
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