Never forget their sacrifices
- Thread starter bigboxes
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Normandy is on my bucket list to visit. So sad how few WWII vets are left.
http://www.nationalww2museum.org/ho...tistics.html?referrer=https://www.google.com/
http://www.nationalww2museum.org/ho...tistics.html?referrer=https://www.google.com/
I met one this last week. I made sure to ask what he did. It was the least I could do.
Hitler knew it was coming. Forified the entire northwest European coastline and threw a lot of personnel to defend it. The planning, the execution, the sacrifice. How unreal was this battle. I've been to Gettysburg and could just feel the loss. The Battle of Normandy was a magnitude greater. *plays taps*
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anon_umk0ifu6vj6zi
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Things like this is why I get pissed when I see a shitbag complaing about this country, or saying "America was never great". The capri wearing "males" nowadays would have made it about 10 seconds around the greatest generation.
There's a whole lot of people in this country who IMHO wouldn't be able to deal with the rationing that the general population had to deal with during the war. Take away their smartphones and holy crap the world just ended.
Humans don't change. Give them something worth fighting (and dying) for, and people would answer the bell, same as they always have.
Standing on the cliff with the American cemetery to your back and the empty Omaha beach in front is a scene a movie couldn't write . Thousands and thousands of white crosses lined up with military precision is a sight every American should see and if you are not moved to tears something is wrong. Semper Fi.
Enrozes is dead on and you are dead wrong. I went into the military a lazy teen and left basic training a man. Would I have been able to go from HS straight to Iraq? No way. But after basic training and after ground combat skills training, I was a different person. I no longer took things for granted but I had to be trained to understand what it was like.
No way could I work 14 hour shifts in Iraq without that training and make no mistake, every solider who hit the beach in 1944 had military training. Every soldier that hit the beach that day was not the same person they were when they signed up. They had developed into soldiers. Did it prep them for what they went thru? Hell no. Nothing every can prep you for combat except combat. But people tend to have a way to step up when it is there time.
Would this younger generation have trouble without their iPhones, instant gratification, or instant entertainment that they have been accustomed to? Hell yes they would but its not a need. They'd adapt. Thousands do every week when they ship out to basic training. Don't give me this shit.
And I have all the respect in the world for those soldiers who took the beach that day. Likely the most difficult battle in hundreds of years and likely we will never see a battle like that again. In todays age, we'd have hit the beach with more deep range missiles before storming it. We just didn't have that back then.
Saying that this generation today couldn't do what they did in 1944 is disrespectful towards the soldiers we have protecting us today. They do an amazing job every day for us. So many fight for us in difficult situations in battles that you will never know about because they are classified. Again, not taking anything away from WWII vets. all my respect for them.
Want to bitch about a generation, bitch about the ones that were 18-ish in the 70's & 80's. They killed all industry in this country outside of the service industry. Raised the hell out of the price of housing and college and left us a ridiculous amount of debt to deal with. Also heavily increased the working hours it takes to survive to make a livable paycheck. And how many of them dodged the draft when it was there turn to go fight? How many of them found legal ways "out" of fighting. Go ask Mr. Trump.
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anon_umk0ifu6vj6zi
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I am saying they are largely more unwilling. Hell... I can't even get a kid to work for more than 3 days because "it's too hard". And by no means is the work I do the most labor intensive.
Freak out if you must, but I was basically agreeing with you. I would think it angers you to see a chunk of this generation denegrate the country we live in. If not, so be it.
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anon_umk0ifu6vj6zi
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Me too.
I think we all love and respect our country and want it to be the greatest it can be. Defining greatness and agreeing on how to achieve it is always the tricky part.
Not trying to pick a fight, but those today who ship out to basic VOLUNTEETED to do so. I can't speak for 463 for certain, but I don't see his post slamming the current military members. I think he like I was indicting society in general.
My grandfather was part of the greatest generation. Their lives were tougher. They lived through the depression. A much larger percentage of people were living on farms vs today. They had to work. There was nowhere near the governmental social programs there are today. You had to be....self reliant.
I wasn't in the military but, I have the utmost respect for those who have served. If I had to chose between a crew of all military vs all college educated to work the streets for me, I'd take military EVERY time.
If God forbid we ever had to institute the draft, IMHO I just dont see the overall 'buy in' from the draft eligible population vs the greatest generation. We have by far the least healthy and most obese population in the industrialized world. We've raised a couple of participation ribbon generations. Heck, I've seen numerous police recruits quit on the first day of an Academy class (tame vs the military basic).
So again, not sure how you found an insult to today's military members?
No they aren't.
When 9/11 happened, every military service hit their quota, as did Intelligence Agencies and other paramilitary style forces.
Its not quite my generation's fault having been born in 1982, that the terrorists couldn't execute a threat anywhere near as demanding as 1941 Germany and Japan, combined. The Army simply wouldn't have been able to absorb all the kids who wanted to kill radical extremists, even if 20 million showed up on a doorstep somewhere.
Keep in mind that the parents of the current Millenial generation, had young adulthood in the post Vietnam war era and are still telling their kids they are soft even though the only real military activity for that generation was a 100 hour Iraqi ground war and a couple of small incursions into places like Granada. Those "soft kids" have seen more war than the parents did, even if one does a direct comparison of a father who served in the 70's 80's and 90's vice a son who served in the 90's and 00's.
War sucks. My father served in the Army Air Corps on the tail end of WWII. I had an uncle that served in the Navy '43-'46. I lost two family members in the Pacific (Guadalcanal and Okinawa). I personally think Americans today would be just as great if called upon. This thread is just a dedication to those that did the unthinkable some 72 years ago.
The Army Major who I sit next to (he was recently selected for Lt. Col. but hasn't pinned on yet) is 42. He's not quite the "soft kid" that most people associate with the generation that fought the war on terror. He was a fairly young captain who owned one of the toughest parts of the fight and his only guidance was "fix the city" and was handed the keys to Sadr City (one of the worst spots in Iraq).
He has never, ever tried to take anything away from the Greatest Generation. But he does feel that the perceived "they were more willing" thing is overblown. That Army was in a draft environment, you were told to show up or else. Its hard to under estimate the impact of that. Millenial with an iPhone would have little other choice to comply as well, had we kept that paradigm.
The draft isn't "coming back".
If a war is so big that it necessitates killing 30 million Russians or Chinese, we aren't going to mess with doing it with 40 billion rounds of 556 ammo and 155m shells. Three hundred nukes will go somewhere and that'll be the end of it.
That's one thing us and the Greatest Generation agreed upon, there's no need to put a couple million hardened Marines in Japan when you can just start nuking cities until they stop.
I agree, and that's a good thing. That's why I said "god forbid." Hypothetically, If it ever does become necessary because we run out of those willing to volunteer, we're screwed.
I'm not terribly worried about that. The number of people who have volunteered for service in the US military has been roughly the same throughout all the generations, roughly on the order 1% -5% of the US population. Any population is going to have at least some folks who have a desire to serve.
Luckily enough for the US, some of the greatest minds of the ages came to the conclusion that no empire could sustain more than 1% of its labor force towards military aims anyway. At least that's the claim according to Gibbons in "Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire".
http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/05/world/europe/d-day-training-mission/
Let's not forget those involved in Operation Tiger
http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/05/world/europe/d-day-training-mission/
Let's not forget those involved in Operation Tiger
http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/05/world/europe/d-day-training-mission/
Probably the most sobering is the roll call of Americans who lie in unmarked graves across the globe .Tens of thousands who left relatives to wonder what happened to their loved ones Including my step brother Calvin Owen who vanished over the delta in 1968. "You sleep secure in your beds tonight because rough men stand ready to do violence on your behalf " Semper Fi.
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