Veteran's Day

As we mark Veteran’s Day, I want to share a personal story with you. My father enlisted in the Army in 1942, shortly after Pearl Harbor. He was 21 years old. He served in the Pacific theatre, in the Philippines and New Guinea. During my father’s life, he did not discuss many of the aspects of his time in the war, and what was discussed were generally non combat related matters, the natives in the Philippines and New Guinea, the local flora and fauna. He rarely talked about the discomfort that he undoubtedly suffered while there, lack of supplies, jungle conditions, fatigue and the horror. There were a couple of things that he did say, one being that the Filipinos sometimes beheaded Japanese soldiers and posed for photographs with the heads, and that once while on patrol, his unit drank water from a stream only later to discover upstream the body of a dead soldier. As bad as those things were, he never spoke of killing the enemy or of losing friends in combat.

After my father died in 2004, I came upon a small pocket sized diary, previously unknown to me, that my father had while he was in the war. I could not make much sense of it initially, partially because of Dad’s scrawled writing, and as I finally figured out, he wrote in the diary from the back to the front. In the diary he wrote, “My friend, …………, was shot, stayed up all night bailing water from foxhole to keep from drowning. He fought hard to live, but died the next day.

These are our heros, We should always remember.

A Tale of Two Juries

Maybe it is just me, but how is it that a jury can convict Birmingham Mayor Larry Langford on 60 counts in less than two hours?

http://www.bhamweekly.com/2009/10/28/langford-guilty-on-all-counts/

and another jury can find this former Judge not guilty when he spanked prisoners for his own sexual gratification and basically admitted doing it?

http://www.lagniappemobile.com/articles/2747-thomas-found-not-guilty-on-all-charges

Still scratching my head over this one.