I posted the following on another thread just a bit ago (the Mark Twain War Prayer thread), but having read the posts on this thread, I believe it might have fit better here. So, with your indulgence, I will poke it in here as well. In re-reading it, it occurred to me that I was a bit "Americo-centric" in stating that WWII started when I was ten (1941). I was thinking of Pearl Harbor. It actually started in both Europe and Asia a number of years earlier. My apologies.

----------------------------------------------------

Having been chided that making an anti-war statement in proximity to Veteran's Day was "insensitive," I would like to clarify my thoughts on the matter.

My father was a veteran—of World War I. "The War to End All Wars." He was on the cutting edge of technology at the time: the newly formed armored cavalry—the tank corps. I had a number of relatives who fought in World War II, including a cousin, Art McGuire, who was in the Marines. Captured in the Philippines early in the war, he spent most of the war in a Japanese prison camp after surviving the infamous Bataan Death March. I have a number of friends who fought in the Korean "police action." For example, Dick Gibbons, who wrote Sully's Pail (in DT and recorded by Tom Paxton), who can describe being nearly hit (a mortar round, if I remember right) and diving into a foxhole with his clothes on fire. One of my closest friends was Buzz Ross, married to another close friend. Buzz became a helicopter pilot and was sent to Vietnam just a few weeks before Christmas. Two weeks after he arrived there, while evacuating a bunch of wounded, Buzz's helicopter was hit. He managed to crash-land the chopper, saving the lives of everyone else on board, but he was hit in the head by a rotor that smashed through the cab. He died a day later. Marcia and I spent a New Year's Eve holding each other and weeping.

World War II started when I was ten years old, and it ended when I was fourteen. I followed the war diligently, listening to news reports, reading newspapers and pouring over the pictures in Life Magazine. I was especially fascinated by airplanes, and I could draw a B-25 Mitchell bomber or a P-51 Mustang fighter right down to the last rivet.

When I entered the University of Washington in 1949, I soon met a number of men who were somewhat older than the usual run of college students. My new friends were war veterans going to school on the G. I. Bill. I recall sitting in on a couple of what struck me at the time as really bizarre conversations over coffee in the Husky Union Building cafeteria. One of my friends had been in the Air Force. He had been a fighter pilot in Europe. Another was a German student named Rolf Holtzmann, who was attending the U. of W. on a foreign exchange program. He had been a pilot in the Luftwaffe. These two former fighter pilots—former enemies—spent many hours together discussing the war, enthusiastically comparing the characteristics of the P-51 Mustang and the Messerschmitt ME-109, and combing through past missions in an effort to determine if they had ever come close to meeting in the skies over Europe. They shared a lot of experiences. They shared a love of airplanes and flying. They became good friends.

Had they actually met in the skies over Europe, each would have done his utmost to kill the other.

There's a lesson in that.

I honor and respect veterans, whether it is Veteran's Day of not. BUT—rather than eschewing my anti-war stance, I sincerely believe that the greatest honor that I can pay veterans is to do everything in my poor power to attempt to bring about a world in which war veterans no longer exist. And why would war veterans no longer exist? You figure it out.

Don Firth