Happy Thanksgiving!

[drbassman]

I think "fit" is important Al.  Throwing everybody into the military is probably stupid since we've demonstrated that volunteer armies can and do work.  There are days, however, when I think having some sort of compulsory government/public service right after high school for 1 year would be an interesting experiment and have a lot of positive benefits for all concerned.  Just a thouhgt.

[Highlander]

Dad never spoke about it at all, with very minor exceptions, and the briefest of anecdotes... even after he wrote one draft and we had typed it up he declined to discuss it... when he came down to visit us in '01 with a second draft he was in pain and had hand written the lot from scratch, even though we had given him a double-spaced, single page print copy: loads of space for notes... he was gone two months later...

The comments about regrets about not having served...

Everything about War, especially where there is direct face-to-face contact (like Okinawa), survival is a most purely chance thing... my dad's platoon was number 13 (honest) and consisted of 40 men, each Column had ten platoons, and the 1st Cameronians were split into two Columns - 800 men... my dad's platoon, at the fall of "Blackpool", were reduced to all the officers (Captain down) and one BOR (British Ordinary Ranks), a Bren gun carrying Rifleman: my dad - forty men reduced to six known survivors - dad wrote in his draft that this was purely chance and nothing to do with rank - the shelling and bombing from (iirc) "Oscar's" was purely random...

[drbassman]

I hear ya Kenny.  There's nothing glorious or romantic about war.  It's a curse on humans for sure and we never seem to learn form one war to the next.  Our dad's and their peers were amazing people, we have a lot to be thankful for.