Happy Birthday Marines

Out of context: Reply #6

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  • mg330

    Though it's not about the Marines, I watched Saving Private Ryan for what must have been the fiftieth time, and that movie never fails to leave me with completely admiration and awe of the soldiers who fought there and everywhere else in World War II. War is a horrible thing, but if I'd been born in a different era, I think I should have been alive back then and been in the military.

    The thing that always gets me thinking is the comparison in the size of the world from then and now, meaning, technology didn't exist then for the world to seem so small like it does now with satellites, airborne imagery, terrain maps, etc. Those guys didn't know what was 100 yards in front of them at times. That's all just fascinating to me.

    My grandfather was in the Marines for 26 years, earned a Purple Heart on Iwo Jima in the Third Division, fought at Guam and Bouganville, and was a recruiter for the majority of the time after the war. He always told my dad that the only good thing about the war was that they got to train in New Zealand.

    I love reading about military history. I wish there was some kind of time machine I could jump into to go back in history and experience WWII from different perspectives. War is a horrible thing, but what I admire about that period in history is that it was all necessary. Everyone believed in it. The entire country rallied around it and understood the sacrifice people made.

    I'm fascinated in so many aspects of life at how long it took for information to travel back then. How battle reports and victories made their way from field radios to headquarters to communication methods across the oceans to military command to newspapers and into people's hands and their TV's. What a bygone era that is now when everything is at our fingertips 10 seconds ago.

    mg33 0Permalink
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