Veteran's Day

A vet's a vet afaic. My father was stationed in Los Alamos during WWII. He didn't see combat. That was a good place for him. He was smart, but didn't have a keen grasp of the physical world. Giving him a rifle, and sending him to field would have been a bad move. He did shoot someone during sentry duty one night. Probably a Mexican that found himself in the wrong place :^D Anyway, still a vet.

Happy Veteran's Day to all the vets in The House!
 
I believe a fuller understanding of life and philosophy can be gained through a modest use of psychedelics. Applied properly, with only short term use can come long gained benefits.
 
I believe a fuller understanding of life and philosophy can be gained through a modest use of psychedelics. Applied properly, with only short term use can come long gained benefits.

As you may have heard, psychedelics are also being used to help athletes with CTE from head trauma.
 
I just finished reading “All The Light We Can Not See”, set in WW II.

Late to comment, as it’s been busy with the grandson. On Veterans Day I often think of friends and family, my father’s time training other bombardiers for B29s; Uncle who was on the ground for most of the European theater ( I remember holding his trophy German Luger when I was 10 years old), a neighbor who was the first Delawarean to die in Vietnam; another neighbor’s brother who went MIA guarding the Tu Cau bridge near DaNang; my draft number was high but I recall my conversations with those who went like Steve and Rick, brothers who once returned had the rock band named “Đụ Mày Anh” (F*** Y** in Vietnamese, though they were ‘billed’ as ‘Due Miami’ on the show posters); Rick died a few years back from complications of Agent Orange.
And in the past year I have been helping Brad, a young man busted up in Iraq, as he’s climbed out of addiction and started into woodworking. I volunteer at Saluting Branches each year to honor these and others.

The senselessness of war is epitomized in this story I read over this Veterans Day.

Our Veterans Day falls on what used to be called Armistice Day. On that day in 1918, the major fighting of World War I ended.
My grandfather fought in France in WWI, but when I think of that horrific, interminable conflict, and all that it says about war, I think not of him, but of George Lawrence Price.
In 1918, Price was a private serving with Company A of the 28th Battalion of the Canadian Expeditionary Force in Belgium. Along with all the other exhausted soldiers, Price had heard that their leaders had negotiated for the guns in Europe to fall silent once and for all on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. The soldiers hardly dared to hope the peace would really come to pass.
As the moment of the armistice approached, a few soldiers continued to skirmish, and Price's company set out to take control of the small town of Havre. As they crossed a canal to their target, a German gunner hidden in a row of houses tried to stop them. Once safely across, just ten minutes before the armistice, the Canadian patrol began to look for the German soldier who had harassed them. They found no one but civilians in the first two homes they searched. And then, as they stepped back into the street, a single shot hit Price in the chest. He fell into the arms of his comrade, who pulled him back into the house they had just left. As Price died, German soldiers cleared their guns in a last burst of machine-gun fire that greeted the armistice.
Price’s life ended just two minutes before the Great War was over.
Even at the time, Price’s death seemed to symbolize the pointless slaughter of WWI. When an irony of history put Price in the same cemetery as the first Allied soldier to die in the conflict, disgusted observers commented that the war had apparently been fought over a half-mile of land. In the years after the war ended, much was made of George Price, the last soldier to die in the Great War.
But ever since I learned Price’s story, I have been haunted by the unknown story of the German sniper who killed him. What made that man take that one last life, two minutes before the war ended? Was it rage? Fear? Had the war numbed him into a machine that simply did its job? Or was it a final, deadly act of revenge against a world that had changed beyond his reckoning?
And what did the knowledge that he had stolen another man’s future—legally, but surely immorally—do to the man who pulled that trigger? He went back to civilian life and blended into postwar society, although the publicity given to Price's death meant that he must have known he was the one who had taken that last, famous life in the international conflagration. The shooter never acknowledged what he had done, or why.
Price became for the world a heartbreaking symbol of hatred’s sheer waste. But the shooter? He simply faded into anonymity, becoming the evil that men do
 
Totally agree. Senseless it is. And I think it will always continue to go on. People do not seem to be able to grow beyond the madness.
 
I have only recently come to understand that my grandfather's older brother (Isaac Remer Boyette) went to World War 1 so that my grandfather (Noah Askew Boyette) would not have to go. Granddaddy was about to get married and Uncle Remer said that he would join up instead of my grandfather.

Uncle Remer died just one month before the war ended... machine-gunned by Germans very close to where Alvin York was doing his heroic deeds at the time... In October of 2018. My son, grandsons and I found his grave in a south Georgia cemetery a few months ago. He had been buried in France, October 11th, 1918 the day after he was machine-gunned, and reburied at least twice in France before he finally made it home to be received by his mother at the train station... October 11th, 1921. Exactly three years after he was first buried in France, . He was finally buried in south Georgia. What sadness.

I was able to find this "Burial card" thru the internet:

Burial card Isaac Remer Boyett 1.png Burial card Isaac Remer Boyett 2.png
 
That's a cool thing to have Gary, and great that you were able to get it online.
 
I agree...I was astounded when I was able to see such an old and important (to us) document. And that was me being a noob in the research dept. Someone skilled at these things should be able to find so much more.
 
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