Amen, Jerry.

Like many of the young men of the time, I stayed to hell out of a war I thought was madness. But the men and women I have met who went there, and friends from my youth who went and did not come back, have never left my mind. The ones who died in the flesh and the ones who came back with dead souls and singed minds. And the few who came back and went on living, making the best of a mad world.

I know a few heroes from WWII and probably many more than I even realize, because so many men said so little about what they went through in the war.

It has always irritated me, the dissonance; I hate war, despise its stupidity, its brutal unreason, and yet those who go into it are heroic in my mind. It was not their failure which brought the wars into existence; they are not the declarers, nor the instigators. They accept what has been given and proceed into hell with huge gouts of fear and courage and rage and gawd-knows-what-else, and they keep walking.

I do not know anyone who comes out unscarred; some succumb to the insanity they have been forced to take in, and others outshine it sooner or later.

God bless them all.



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