Some small stories....

Short sleep last night.  Our daughter had a friend over for a sleep-over, which isn't a bad thing.  but having them wake up and raid the kitchen at 4 AM wasn't very good.  :-(

I think the long rant the other day was just me working through some thoughts and reflections on life.
 I had been thinking about how my Grandfather was younger than I am now when he first held me.  He was there with as many questions as I have about life and the how and the why, holding his first grandchild.

He was happy, at least he looks it in the pictures.  I think he was still questioning what it was all really for.  23 years before that he was in France not believing he was going to see another week.  In what felt like a few days, he is holding his daughters child and is a grandfather.

He talked to me a few times about the war, no long in depth things, usually just short little ones.  We were talking about shooting and hunting once, and he mentioned that the open sights on the rifles they used could be aimed at a mile, but the post would completely block out the person you were aiming at.  You could see them coming, and though you didn't want to shoot this stranger you had to choose if he was going home or if you were.

He never talked about those sorts of things with enthusiasm or like he was re-living some glorious past.  It is a horrible thing to be put in that position, to treat other human beings that way.  At least now we are recognizing that the result of combat IS PTSD and it is not an exception, it is the rule!  I would question the mental health of anyone who could go through that and come out "perfectly fine".

Of course his generation still had the hold-over from WWI and you were expected to just keep your chin up and carry on.  After all, we wouldn't want the officials back home to have to acknowledge  any negative consequences to orders they gave.

Don't get me wrong, there are times when that sort of thing is the only way to stop evil.  But I think we need to recognize the full consequences for everyone involved and not allow the great wheels of advertising  to cloud our vision.  At least in WWI our officials were up-front and called it what it was;
PROPAGANDA

There was even a book written about it with that title.  They were amazed at how effective their techniques were in turning peace loving citizens into German hating fanatics.  I don't know if they realized that they were cashing in on the public trust in order to send tens of thousands to die in a pre-computer game of World of Warcraft.

And there was my grandfather, caught up in the middle of it.  I remember when I was little, I knew he had been in the war and that he had fought in France.  When I was in the corner store (Red Top) I would read the war comics and imagine what it was like to fight the evil Nazi forces, and how heroic that would have been!  Weird War, Sgt. Rock, Unknown Soldier, G.I. Combat, I wondered if my grandpa ever saw any of the planes or tanks in the stories, or captured any Germans.  I could not understand, being small, the horror that war is.  Those books didn't show it beyond some lifeless bodies in some pictures.  They did not overtly make it desirable, but the heroes lived to fight, not to go home.  This was in contrast to the stories I heard from the one combatant that I knew.  He talked about how they all hoped to get a "nice" injury and be sent home, like a nice leg wound.  It strikes me now how bad it must have been because this was while penicillin was just being tested.  A "nice" leg wound could easily cost you the leg, maybe your life.  But that was better than staying.

He told me of one time in France he and his partner dropped into their foxhole while some shelling was going on.  When they came up, their radio log book had a hole punched through it from shrapnel.  They both lamented that they hadn't had their legs stuck up in the air, they could have gone home!

Later, while digging another foxhole, they came across a wine bottle that was still full.  Gramps didn't trust it, but his partner drank.  He became very sick, and the next time grandpa saw him he was heading to a plane and going back to Canada.

Not Grandpa, his former partner.

Grandpa was just healing up from a wound and was being sent back to the front.  The other fellow had recovered completely from whatever had ailed him, but they had decided that he should be discharged!  Grandpa sure wished he had joined him in that drink!