Thank you Lolo

Yesterday (Nov 11th) was Veteran's day.

My husband was in the unorganized militias that sprang up at the end of WWII in answer to McArthur's call for the Filipinos to rise up and throw out their oppressors. His brother however was in that war longer, as was his cousin, who was captured and killed by the Japanese.

 My son in law and his son are US Navy.

and then there are my uncles, cousins, and various friends. My cousin's ship was hit by a kamikazi; another cousin was killed in a similar attack, but they never found his body.

Aan uncle was in the Engineers building bridges in Italy.

. A lot of my classmates and several cousins served in VietNam, One of my classmates got a Medal of Honor when he was killed trying to rescue a wounded soldier under fire by the VietCong. They knew the fight there was for a corrupt government, but they also saw the many more atrocities committed by the enemy there, including the mass graves of Hue that never got into the US News.

And no one dared back then in college to say to the anti war activists: Well, wait a second that is not true. Because they were the good guys fighting for peace (A peace that resulted in 10 million refugees, racial cleansing of their Chinese ethnics, a war against China, and a Cambodian holocaust... and maybe, if they hadn't become tired of war, a communist Philippines where my Filipino family would have been shot as "rich landlords".)

The returning soldiers were scorned when they returned by a left that believed the lies and exaggerated the problems, and pretended that smoking pot at an anti war festival made them heroic. That is why I can't take the professional rioters in the streets seriously. Follow the money.

The soldiers identified with the original Rambo, who was dissed by those not fit to clean his shoes. If they had followed his example, there would have been a civil war in the 1970's. But like most of the Trumpettes, they came home, went to work, married, and had children. The "Myth" of the crazy Vietnam Vet is an exaggeration, you know.

The revolt of the Trumpettes is not new. It started the day when self righteous affluent yuppies spit in the faces of a returning VietNam Vet.


David Warren writes in remembrance of his father and grandfather who also served.

Pause to pray, on behalf of our fathers, for all those buddies who did not come home. Whose mothers wept when they read the cable; whose fathers stood to attention, lost; whose little siblings ran about the yard.

Think strangely of all the missing descendants, of those boys called from the Ontario farms (and from every quiet corner of the Empire). And of their time of trial, among bullets and bombs: terrified but indomitable. Of those who lay in the mud of battle; and those who lived, to gutter out in age. Of our dead who sleep under the winter snows. Sinking, now, deeper in the earth, one with the veterans of Thermopylae.