Metropoulos Forum

Just a remberance...

hell yeah chief. awoke the sleeping giant.

45auto wrote:hell yeah chief. awoke the sleeping giant.

yeah, when we didn't have one hand tied behind our back...

huh?

Nowadays it's all about who we can't offend and being PC and the media spin, etc...

Afghanistan should have had a week to turn over Bin Laden or we should have made it a lake.

Iraq I don't agree with but I'm sick of hearing about the bad things our soldiers are doing and not enough of the good things.

That Zeitgeist movie's take on Pearl Harbor was something else.

I love the routine that Carlos Mencia does about this. A japanese guy is talking to a Taliban member: "You dont know... dont you have a History Channel? They dont come with 1,000 bomb, or 500 bomb, or 100 bomb... they come with two bomb... TWO BOMB!! Bomb so big, it make our penis smaller".

HBO had a documentary about Nagasaki and Horoshima. The survivor stories are some of the most hardcore things you would hear on this earth.

NY Chief wrote:Nowadays it's all about who we can't offend and being PC and the media spin, etc...

Afghanistan should have had a week to turn over Bin Laden or we should have made it a lake.

Iraq I don't agree with but I'm sick of hearing about the bad things our soldiers are doing and not enough of the good things.

+1


I wonder how things would have turned out had our "media" been around back then?

Every year, our organization has a ceremony to remember and invites survivors to participate and speak. Afterward, they break bread and knock back a couple with the younger troops. When I served, I stood in a fair number of those ceremonies. Each year, there are fewer survivors to remember. Hope we never forget.

I was fortunate enough to see the Arizona memorial in Pearl Harbor (O'ahu, HI). I mean I saw the fuel oil bubbling up from the ship to the surface. I even saw and listened to one of the survivors (now elderly). There is a big wall of names and they do a video presentation, etc. For better or worse, we sure dealt it back in spades at Midway and Hiroshima. Very sobering.

I was born in Watson Lake, a small town in the Yukon on the Alaska Highway. Watson Lake is famous for it's "Sign Post," a huge collection of signs from all over North America and other parts of the world. It was started by a homesick American soldier who was working on the Highway. At the Signpost site they have a museum as well (good employment in a town of 840 people or so) with a theater. I remember that the lady who ran the theater must have really liked me, because I would always bike down there and she'd always play me the WWII stuff whenever I came around. The bombing of Pearl Harbor figured largely in those old black and white reels. I was haunted by the sounds of divebombing aircraft engines. There would be intricate maps of the Aleutian Islands and footage of Alaskan defense strongholds, and I can vividly recall footage of the hideously destroyed battleships in Pearl Harbour, their large masts ruined. The signpost itself is also a strangely eerie place, with so many kind of sentimental type things collected in one place. Early on I got this idea that our land was defended, not all that long ago, by a huge bunch of people from "our" part of the world who were fighting against people from "another" part of the world that did us wrong, originally. (It sure doesn't feel that way anymore, looking at the middle east, that is). When I was 5, we moved South, to the Vancouver area here. Better schools down here! I guess it also helps that my mom is an American (I'm a son of the American Revolution too), but I've always been "memorious" of the 7th of December. It is a soft spot we ought to never forget. Modern movies with the Ben Afflecks and what not do not help IMO.

thousandshirts wrote: Modern movies with the Ben Afflecks and what not do not help IMO.

ANY movie w/ Affleck!

You're right. We took a beating and gave it back. And it cost a lot of lives and innocence. Very BRAVE lives I might add. It was a different time and unfortunately a different kind of enemy.

Billy Batz wrote:HBO had a documentary about Nagasaki and Horoshima. The survivor stories are some of the most hardcore things you would hear on this earth.

Horrible thing, Dan. To do that to a fellow human being...and that includes Pearl....

JD wrote:I was fortunate enough to see the Arizona memorial in Pearl Harbor (O'ahu, HI). I mean I saw the fuel oil bubbling up from the ship to the surface. I even saw and listened to one of the survivors (now elderly). There is a big wall of names and they do a video presentation, etc. For better or worse, we sure dealt it back in spades at Midway and Hiroshima. Very sobering.

I saw that too JD, was probably standing in the same spot as you on the Monument. Was there in the fall of '92.
I remember being sort of mesmerized looking at the oil "blips" coming up to the surface.
The big wall with all the names was sobering indeed, seeing names of brothers who were killed at the same time. I seem to recall the name "Anderson" in that context.