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November 15, 2005

A Real Band of Brothers

You should go read this article about 6 brothers from my home town, all whom served in WWII and/or Korea. (registration req'd, use Bugmenot) It's things like this that have me wondering lately. If, God forbid, we ever get into a situation like WWII again, how will we respond? We often forget or romanticize, I think, just how bad things were then. There were shortages & rationing, we lost many of the initial battles, and there was no short rotations or instant communications for the troops.

A few months after Cliff was shipped out of country, Mary gave birth to their first child, a son, Charles Gene Harness. However, the baby died from several serious ailments when he was only four months old. "Cliff never got the chance to see the baby," said Mary. "As a matter of fact, communications were so bad in those days he didn't get the news from the telegram until one month later when he was stationed in India."

Mary is quick to point out that the toughest part of her life was when she didn't get to see her husband for nearly three years - from February 1943 until November 1945. "Back then you couldn't just pick up a telephone and talk overseas during the war, so we wrote each other a lot of letters."

Fairly typical for that time, I'd say. Yet I doubt Mary ever thought of protesting the war, or prancing around for the media insisting that the troops be brought home in the middle of the war.

I sometimes worry that there are too few of us like Mary left, willing to make the sacrifices necessary to protect our way of life. I try to remember that the Marys of the world avoid publicity, and those protestors who seek it are the minority. But is that really the case? I don't know the answer.

Just something I ponder in the wee hours of the morning.

Posted by Rita at November 15, 2005 01:33 PM

Comments

I truly hope you are right about people like Mary being in the majority, but I too worry that they are not. I believe that a press corps interested only in "gotcha" stories are part of the problem. During WWII, someone like Cindy Sheehan would be, at best, ignored and, at worst, roundly condemned. Not so today.

Posted by: Jim - PRS at November 15, 2005 03:29 PM

Just caught the end of a tv show about WWI in which it was claimed Germany secretly supported Lenin's revolution so that it wouldn't have to fight the war on two fronts. I was struck by the the tactics Lenin, et al, used to get the government to withdraw its troops. They were practically identical to those used by the protesters/leftists today.

Kinda made me go hmmmm.

Posted by: Rita [TypeKey Profile Page] at November 16, 2005 04:38 AM