"There are few die well who die in battle." (Henry V)

.....According to a recent Time magazine article, Tom Hanks who made the film, "Saving Private Ryan" is now engaged in a new history making project --a 10 hour epic HBO film, "The Pacific". Whereas "Ryan" and the "Band of Brothers" documents WWII in Europe, "The Pacific" recounts the hellish war in the vast Pacific against Japan and people we thought were "different'' from us. With the production of his newest venture into American history, Hanks, like Brokaw, has turned into a spokesperson for the Greatest Generation. The strange thing is that Hanks was never interested in history; at school, all he remembers learning about WWII was that Pearl Harbor was bombed by the Japanese and that American revenge came when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. But Tom, while making "Private Ryan" realized just how immense was his deficit in the Pacific theater history.

....To Hanks, a classic baby boomer, born in 1956, WWII was just a black and white mystery. His father was a U.S Naval mechanic in the war and wasn't the type to tell his son tales of bravery and sacrifice. He had nothing nice to say about the Navy; he hated the Navy. So Tom's interest in WWII was and is an anomaly. In all the films that he and Spielberg made, they wrestled with the question of how, from the barbarity of war, could young American men be asked to indiscriminately kill a shadowy enemy and then return to order groceries in WalMart and merge back into a Coca Cola society. The answer is, they can't. Even Audie Murphy, the most decorated soldier in WWII suffered from PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. During one episode of that disorder, he held his wife hostage at gunpoint.

.....I have been afflicted with PTSD ever since my discharge from the Naval service in 1945 when I returned to a world that I had forgotten and couldn't cope with. I spent five months in a VA hospital, suicidal and depressed before entertaining the idea that I could go to college, not only to learn things I had never known, but also as a hiding place from the real world. Just recently, my daughter, Robin, decided that she would visit Rhoda and me for a weekend, and then on a Sunday fly us to Virginia where we would have lunch with my two sons, Joel's wife, Barbara, Bobby's friend Alice, and my grandson and his girlfriend, Molly. After lunch, the plan was to then fly back to Florida in the private plane that Robin leased for this venture--an enticing one--except for the fact that I never want to climb into a plane again in my life. I want to eliminate every stressful venture that I can at this point, and flying has been stressful for me since 1945. I flew 2000 hours in WWII; I've had enough of that.

.....We now have three people in the family that have published books; Robin's "Patriot Dreams" about her husband's capture in Lebanon; Joel's "Phases of the Moon," about his experiences in Israel and Panama; and my "Memoirs of a Tail Gunner." But now, we have another "child" who is starting his own blog at:

http://newundersol.blogspot.com/

Check it out--it's different.