Saturday mornings.

So I am home and it is a snowy Saturday morning and I have to go out and shovel a little snow. Oh, well.

One of the things someone said is that to ought to be a snap for me because I have a heavy duty snow blower. That's a idiotic statement when you think about it.

Setting a snowblower up for less than about 8 inches of snow is a waste of time, effort and gasoline. It's much easier to shovel a path. Eight inches isn't going to make parking a problem, either.

I read Eugene Sledge's excellent memoir, 'China Marine' and found it to be more interesting than his combat memoir, 'With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa'.

It  made me think for a while and I would not be surprised to read that Sledge was pretty upset over doing China occupation duty after a pair of grinding Pacific island campaigns. If he felt he got screwed by this he might rethink his position.

His time in China gave him at least a couple of months to decompress. Although he returned home to Alabama a bitter, angry man it likely would have been worse had he come straight home after Okinawa.

I have spoken to a couple of Pacific veterans that were discharged almost instantly after the fighting stopped and a couple of them expressed a feeling of being cheated. They ran through boot camp, trained, shipped out and fought, retrained, fought again and went straight home after the last shot was fired.

While many were glad to go straight home, a couple expressed the feeling that some sort of brief postwar duty might have served as a decompression period.

I commented to one that he got screwed because of this and he thought a minute and agreed.

Our GIs in Vietnam had it somewhat worse in terms of no decompression. The WW2 guys at least had a long voyage home in a troop ship. With air travel, a Vietnam GI could be literally sitting at home two or three days after a major firefight, still vibrating and shaking.

Anyway, Sledge's ;China Marine' is a pretty good read. 







To find out why the blog is pink just cut and paste this: http://piccoloshash.blogspot.com/2009/12/my-feminine-side-blog-stays-pink.html NO ANIMALS WERE HARMED IN THE WRITING OF TODAY'S ESSAY