Thanks for the link! You, uh, seem to have a lot of readers prepared to go anywhere you send them. Ever thought of conquering the world?

Ever thought of conquering the world?

I've thought about it, but I'm lazy.

You, uh, seem to have a lot of readers prepared to go anywhere you send them.

Shoot, they go places I explicitly tell them not to go. Did I spike your sitemeter? I've always wondered what kind of traffic I move with a link.

You push some pretty serious traffic with each link, at least on my personal scale of "serious". It's nothing bad or bandwidth-eating, but for example my Clarksville galleries were instantly the most-viewed pictures I have. (This is a good thing. I like to sew madness wherever I can.) My blog is low-traffic, but when you link to it I see that traffic, in general, double or more, going from the neighborhood of probably 100-150 visitors a day to 250-300. I have no idea how many of those are spam-referrers and the like, so it's difficult for me to get a real measure, but I do see a definite spike.

And sure enough, some "conservative" troll taunts the author in the comments, asking if he "loves his enemies to death". sigh...

How do we deal with the blight of fear and paranoia running rampant within the GOP base right now? I mean, really- what gives with those folks? They've all got guns, why the hell are they so scared (so scared, as the commentor illustrates, that they duck the accusation of destroying another genertion of young men and go straight, O-Reily-Limbaugh-weasel-style to questioning the sensibility of the author)?

I am imagining Mr. McPants sewing up the fabric of madness... of course, he's been sowing that shit all year round...

My uncle was in the European theatre - when my grandmother died, he burned all his letters to her that she had saved.

My father, a rear gunner - stopped writing home from the Pacific after the mission when he and the pilot were the only people to come back alive. Though he kept in touch with friends from the war (and many have kept in touch with my mother after his death), he never discussed the actual was with my mother, his mother or any of my siblings.

(My other uncle was on a submarine. They have yearly reunions.)

Back in 1992, I was at the beach in a car on the way to buy a couple of gallons ice cream with the husband of a friend. He was just back from Iraq. The road and the sand dunes caused him to have a panic attack and he pulled off on the side of the road and cried. His job had been cleaning the bodies hit by air force fire from the roads after the war was mostly over and the flyboys had gone home. And as strange as that was - for me - I was glad we hadn't brought his kids.

Thank you for posting the link.

My grandmother's second husband, and the only grandfather I knew personally, served as a Sergeant in WW2. He landed on D-Day at Normandy and was among the first troops to advance (his job being to lay down temporary bridges for the heavy equipment to cross). After serving a year or two, he was eventually sent home after taking shrapnel in the legs from a mine blast. Tho he kept his legs, he was plagued with vascular problems throughout his life.

When I was a kid, and a bit of a ghoul seeking "cool" war stories, I used to badger him for some lurid tale of blood and death. But he was reluctant to talk about his time in the service. On occasions when he had a few beers in him, he gave up three, and only three, war stories:

1. About the time spent waiting in England for the weather to improve prior to the D-Day invasion. He said that everyone was pretty eager to get going, until they actually landed on the beach. "Hey," he claims to have shouted to a buddy, "these sonsabitches are shootin' at us!" Before his pal could respond, he was shot dead.

2. About the time he and his unit were holed up at a French farm, where they got drunk on wine and killed a goose for dinner.

3. About the time his unit captured a German Captain, who refused to answer questions from any soldier of a lesser rank. After a good pistol-whipping, the Captain was more forthcoming.

I know that during his time in Europe, my grandfather had to kill face-to-face more than once and that these incidents haunted him. When he was dying, after a failed heart valve operation in 1988, he was convinced he was going to hell. And I suspect it wasn't for missing mass or dating a waitress on the side. Of course, I can't be certain, but I think he believed his only unforgivable act was the killing he did in the war.

I have three uncles between the two WWII theatres, but "generations" were once a whole different thing; each of 9 sibs spent time "in the service", as any of them might call it -- the last few well after Korea.

Apparently 3 blue stars in the window stood, among other things, as insurance against the potential hazard of bearing a German name in what was still basically a frontier town. The first personal story I ever heard in my father's family about the war told how the county's "other" German family abruptly disappeared (presumably after "the events of December 7th, 1941").

The only tale I have heard of my family in wartime service was told of one uncle by at least 2 of his brothers with assistance from all around the room -- a room he was in when they told the story. He's easily the most garrulous of the lot (and the averaqe is high), but I don't think he spoke more than a couple dozen words.

However few the stories, though, I believe Our Soldiers must remain part of a community of siblings and cousins and cousin's neighbors. I don't care who the fucking Commander in Chief is; if G.I. Joe thinks about him when charging into harm's way, then our species is screwed.

How do we deal with the blight of fear and paranoia running rampant within the GOP base right now? I mean, really- what gives with those folks? They've all got guns, why the hell are they so scared (so scared, as the commentor illustrates, that they duck the accusation of destroying another genertion of young men and go straight, O-Reily-Limbaugh-weasel-style to questioning the sensibility of the author)?

And what kills me is that those most afraid seem to be mostly from places that have about a 0% chance of being the target of a terrorist attack.

word, Mitch