THE DIFFERENCE MATTERS

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "GUEST POST FROM JACQUELINE STUART": 

11:12
Sorry for the edited profanity, however I get sick and tired of the Birkenstock wearing, tree-hugging, peaceniks that first put down the Canadian Armed forces and then pooh-pooh an attempt to recognize their contribution because it is somehow a glorification of war.

Posted by Anonymous to  Our Town and Its Business at 19 October 2015 at 13:09

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Thank you for the explanation. This is a sensitive issue.

When I was fifteen,my twenty-one year old brother was killed six months before the second world war 

ended in Europe.  He was in the Royal Air Force

His tour of duty had ended but he was transferred to new crew and started over. The raid was over the German Ruhr. 

As flight-engineer, he needed to move about the plane. It meant he didn't wear a  parachute. 

The plane,still laden with explosives,was hit. Half the crew was killed and he was wounded and bleeding. 

He and another survivor wearing a parachute wrapped arms around each other and jumped from the 

blazing inferno. 

The other lad was alone when he came back to consciousness. He was taken prisoner and came home after the war ended.

The entire crew were declared missing until I informed the war office what we learned from the survivor. 

My mother's twenty-two year old brother was killed on the beaches of the Dardanelles in 1917. 

My brother had leave the week before he was killed. He shared his experience of what it's like to be inside a huge metal canister loaded with bombs. The noise inside and out, every part rattling with concussion from ack-ack shells  exploding on every side.,Dark and search lights slicing the sky and the thud of bombs a they hit the buildings below, 

During training,they'd been told about initially blacking  out in the jump and being dead before they hit the ground, if the chute didn't open. 

Then there was the laden silence in personnel carriers that brought them back to base after returning from a raid. Voices locked in throats with terror for hours after the horror ended. 

There is no glory in war. 

Only, for those who fought and survived, horror, fear, carnage, grief and a lifetime of tormented  memories of terrible  things  witnessed and comrades who never came home.