Saturday Stuff

Ray let me know about the book, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: A Photographer's Chronicle of the Iraq War which is by Ashley Gilbertson.

Other reads concerning Fallujah that may be of interest to our Marines and readers are

Three Block War II: Snipers in the Sky (which I have just now accidentally deleted the photo of) by Matt Ziegler

and
Fighting For Fallujah: A New Dawn for Iraq by John Ballard

And something Ray told me about a long time ago that I’ve failed to check out (I know you're surprised that I'm behind--yes, on even the things I care so much about) but I think some of you may already know is that Bing West and his son (I think it’s his son) are planning on making a movie out of No True Glory.

Ray has shared some of the details with me before (that are filed away in a file that is quite long!!) so please, Ray, for our readers and the little editor here, can you share those details with us again as well as the link? Or anyone else that may have info. I think quite a nice line-up of actors are already picked to star in this movie!

Hope everyone is having a great Saturday and it’s good that it’s a little warmer here. I’m just kicking around on a lot of this and that. How ‘bout you?

There are still some blogs I plan on visiting before this weekend is out. It was good to do that last night. What an awesome bunch of bloggers we’re linked to!

Semper Fi,

De’on

Virgie Bell's View: From Planet What?

Al "Gassy" Gore - All Heated up over Global Warming.

His "Hot Air" is just making it worse.

How perfectly ignorant and utterly stupid for someone to have an abortion and to become sterilized in order to save carbon credit and to be entitled to a trip without adding to the Greenhouse Effect as presented by Al Gore.

I thought of old Al last night as I have just now started on a new book by Michael Creighton. As you may or may not remember, I posted on Gunz Up the difference in Creighton's and big Al's interpretation as to the business of global warming as set forth by Al Gore and the disputed viewpoint of Creighton.

Creighton has credentials the likes of which I have never seen. Gore and I stand on about equal footing in that department. That is to say, not much. Al Gore has taken a job at some big salary in some big company while Creighton goes on to write one block buster novel after another. There is really no comparison between the two and I do mean ZILCH!

I am surprised that I didn't know about this new book. The title is NEXT and it appears to be a doozey. I have wanted to know more about stem cell research so that I could be more informed as to what it really is. This book was in paperback, which really put me out with my Book Club that I just now found it. On looking back, I do recall there have been a few that I provided the wrong number of which books I wanted. I wish that I had known it was his so I could have re-supplied the club with the right one.

Creighton supplies the different scientific facts and figures to the things that he writes about when he mixes fact and fiction. I do not enjoy a lot of technical reading. I find it absolutely boring. He uses factual material with fictitious characters in the plot in order to pull together a really great storyline as well as a wealth of information. I’m sure when I finish this I will have opinions galore, as well as facts by someone who gives the raw data and not just their Dream world vision fed upon by the winner of the Academy Award winner and Nobel Peace prize winner ,THAT JOLLY OLD AL GORE and Clinton Administration Vice President. Leave it to old Al to receive accolades from the Hollywood Set who have a combined intelligence rating of the average 5th grader.

I don't know who decides on the Nobel Peace Prize and I quit caring as soon as I found out that the tired and weary and totally wimpy Jimmy Carter had received one. Nelson Mandela was a recipient also and I am very unimpressed by this man. He was on the tube declaring Iran had a right to a Nuclear Bomb because the USA had one.

I swear my life has just fallen through the cracks as far as the movies are concerned. “Enchanted” is supposed to be a big hit and it also has Susan Sarandon playing in it. I take it that the part of my life in which I could eat popcorn and have a form of visual escapism is over. I refuse to give one penny to the cause of someone as Anti-American as old Warhorse Sarandon. It seems a shame that one could long for the House of Un-American Activities, but there you go. Just know that when my time comes for my new book that everyone can get ready for some good old smart mouth writing from old smart mouth me. Meanwhile we can look for the light side of the season with poor old tired old Lisa. That should be fun. I hate Greg for the picture as well as Ray and Karen for the only good titles to the dumbest picture we could hope to title.

I’ve been in a pretty good mood today.

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For whom the Bell Tolls
John Donne


From "Devotions upon Emergent Occasions" (1623), XVII: Nunc Lento Sonitu Dicunt, Morieris - "Now, this bell tolling softly for another, says to me: Thou must die."

PERCHANCE he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill, as that he knows not it tolls for him; and perchance I may think myself so much better than I am, as that they who are about me, and see my state, may have caused it to toll for me, and I know not that.
The church is Catholic, universal, so are all her actions; all that she does belongs to all.
When she baptizes a child, that action concerns me; for that child is thereby connected to that body which is my head too, and ingrafted into that body whereof I am a member.
And when she buries a man, that action concerns me: all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.
As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come, so this bell calls us all; but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness.
There was a contention as far as a suit (in which both piety and dignity, religion and estimation, were mingled), which of the religious orders should ring to prayers first in the morning; and it was determined, that they should ring first that rose earliest.
If we understand aright the dignity of this bell that tolls for our evening prayer, we would be glad to make it ours by rising early, in that application, that it might be ours as well as his, whose indeed it is.
The bell doth toll for him that thinks it doth; and though it intermit again, yet from that minute that this occasion wrought upon him, he is united to God.
Who casts not up his eye to the sun when it rises? but who takes off his eye from a comet when that breaks out? Who bends not his ear to any bell which upon any occasion rings? but who can remove it from that bell which is passing a piece of himself out of this world? No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
Neither can we call this a begging of misery, or a borrowing of misery, as though we were not miserable enough of ourselves, but must fetch in more from the next house, in taking upon us the misery of our neighbours.
Truly it were an excusable covetousness if we did, for affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it.
No man hath affliction enough that is not matured and ripened by it, and made fit for God by that affliction.
If a man carry treasure in bullion, or in a wedge of gold, and have none coined into current money, his treasure will not defray him as he travels.
Tribulation is treasure in the nature of it, but it is not current money in the use of it, except we get nearer and nearer our home, heaven, by it.
Another man may be sick too, and sick to death, and this affliction may lie in his bowels, as gold in a mine, and be of no use to him; but this bell, that tells me of his affliction, digs out and applies that gold to me: if by this consideration of another's danger I take mine own into contemplation, and so secure myself, by making my recourse to my God, who is our only security.

Now You Know....

CLICK ON ARTICLE PAGES TO ENLARGE

nIGHT night. Early posts tomorrow hopefully. You know what they say about that worm and bird and early stuff. Ohh, Lord, help me. And we have a Dr's appt. right off the bat!!

Just joking. What better boss than a girl's dad, right? Hhmm. Better get to bed!

Virgie Bell is currently reading this one....

New York Times® Best Sellers: Hardcover Fiction

June 17, 2007

by Khaled Hosseini. (Riverhead, $25.95.) A friendship between two women in Afghanistan against the backdrop of 30 years of war; from the author of “The Kite Runner.

Night, night. My sun is melting fast.

Later and Semper Fi!

World War 1: What would a war be without its cartoons?

Punch Cartoon

The Great War was dominated by two satirical papers; Punch and the journal best known by it's original name, The Wipers Times. Punch magazine was a well-established journal comparable in style and content to today's Private Eye. It had a wide circle of distribution and was recognised by the British Nation as a middle-class and supposedly unbiased account of current affairs.

The Wipers Times took its name for the army slang for Ypres, where it was first produced. It emulated Punch, but contained a more specific type of comedy relating exclusively to the soldiers on the Western Front. The practicalities of trench warfare had created a sudden and often uncomfortable closeness between classes, and therefore The Wipers Times targeted a far wider audience class wise, despite it's relatively limited circulation.

The two papers had many similarities, the greatest being that they shared the same ethos. Both believed that comedy should be employed in a cathartic role against the tension, fear and grief caused by the fighting. However, both dramatically diverge in outlook, contents, the ideas they pursued and the ways in which these ideas were expressed and laid out within each paper.

Yes, testable!

Source

World War I In Flanders Fields (testable)

Prose & Poetry - In Flanders Fields: The Making of the Poem
Updated - Saturday, 11 August, 2001

John McCrae's In Flanders Fields remains to this day one of the most memorable war poems ever written. It is a lasting legacy of the terrible battle in the Ypres salient in the spring of 1915.

One of the most asked questions is: why poppies? The answer is simple: poppies only flower in rooted up soil. Their seeds can lie on the ground for years and years, and only when someone roots up the ground, they will sprout. There was enough rooted up soil on the battlefield of the Western Front; in fact the whole front consisted of churned up soil. So in May 1915, when McCrae wrote his poem, around him poppies blossomed like no one had ever seen before.

As a surgeon attached to the 1st Field Artillery Brigade, Major McCrae, who had joined the McGill faculty in 1900 after graduating from the University of Toronto, had spent seventeen days treating injured men - Canadians, British, Indians, French, and Germans - in the Ypres salient.

It had been an ordeal that he had hardly thought possible. McCrae later wrote of it:

"I wish I could embody on paper some of the varied sensations of that seventeen days... Seventeen days of Hades! At the end of the first day if anyone had told us we had to spend seventeen days there, we would have folded our hands and said it could not have been done."

One death particularly affected McCrae. A young friend and former student, Lieut. Alexis Helmer of Ottawa, had been killed by a shell burst on 2 May 1915. Lieutenant Helmer was buried later that day in the little cemetery outside McCrae's dressing station, and McCrae had performed the funeral ceremony in the absence of the chaplain.

The next day, sitting on the back of an ambulance parked near the dressing station beside the Yser Canal, just a few hundred yards north of Ypres, McCrae vented his anguish by composing a poem. The major was no stranger to writing, having authored several medical texts besides dabbling in poetry.

In the nearby cemetery, McCrae could see the wild poppies that sprang up in the ditches in that part of Europe, and he spent twenty minutes of precious rest time scribbling fifteen lines of verse in a notebook.

A young soldier watched him write it. Cyril Allinson, a twenty-two year old sergeant-major, was delivering mail that day when he spotted McCrae. The major looked up as Allinson approached, then went on writing while the sergeant-major stood there quietly. "His face was very tired but calm as we wrote," Allinson recalled. "He looked around from time to time, his eyes straying to Helmer's grave."

When McCrae finished five minutes later, he took his mail from Allinson and, without saying a word, handed his pad to the young NCO. Allinson was moved by what he read:

"The poem was exactly an exact description of the scene in front of us both. He used the word blow in that line because the poppies actually were being blown that morning by a gentle east wind. It never occurred to me at that time that it would ever be published. It seemed to me just an exact description of the scene."

In fact, it was very nearly not published. Dissatisfied with it, McCrae tossed the poem away, but a fellow officer retrieved it and sent it to newspapers in England. The Spectator, in London, rejected it, but Punch published it on 8 December 1915:

In Flanders Fields

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

World War I Literature: Diaries

Memoirs & Diaries: France, Egypt, Mesopotamia 1915-1916
Updated - Sunday, 16 September, 2001

by E. E. Jones

Background To the Diary

On 5th November 1914 Britain declared war on Turkey and a few days later the first echelon of an expeditionary force, consisting of the 16th Infantry brigade and two Indian mountain batteries under Brigadier-General Delamain, landed at Fao, a fortified town near the head of the Persian Gulf.

After two stubbornly contested engagements both Fao and Basra were captured. The invasion of Mesopotamia was ostensibly to protect the oil wells at the head of the Persian Gulf. This motive became obscured, however, when, lured by the prospect of capturing the legendary Baghdad, the British commander Gen. Sir John Nixon sent forces under Maj. Gen. Charles Townshend up the Tigris. After overwhelming a Turkish outpost near Qurna in an amphibious assault on May 31 1915, Townshend began to move inland. By September the British had taken Kut-el-Amara. Refusing to stop there, Nixon ordered the reluctant Townshend to continue northward.

Click here for continuation

World War I Literature: Memoir

Memoirs & Diaries: A Gunner's Adventure
Updated - Sunday, 9 September, 2001

by N. H. Bradbury

One of the most exciting experiences which befell me during the War happened on the Somme front on June 26th, 1916, four days before the great Allied offensive. Our battery, of which I was a signaller, was in action at Sailly-au-Bois, and was to support the attack on Gommecourt Wood on July 1st.

It was my turn to be on duty at the "O.P.," so off I started on my journey, accompanied by two other comrades, one acting as a runner. We fully realized that a hot time was in store for us, his duty being to carry messages back to Headquarters, which were situated in Hebuterne village, should occasion arise in any emergency, such as telephonic communication breaking down or other unforeseen circumstances arising. My other comrade, Signaller Thompson, was to assist with the work that we were to do at the "O.P."

Leaving the battery at half-past seven, the three of us made our way over the plain, passing Hebuterne Wood and along the road, and through a winding of trenches known as "Wood Street," to a place called "The Grotto" and some more trenches known as "The Keep," well-known spots in this sector, where more often than not, one had to keep very alert of machine-gun fire, owing to the fine overlooking position the Hun had at his command.

The morning was fine and bright with the sun just breaking through. We leisurely made our way along the trench leading to our observation post, which was situated at a junction of the support and front-line trenches, arriving there about nine o'clock.

After testing our telephone lines and receiving the "O.K." from the stations in communication with us, we awaited the arrival of the major and Lieutenant Hasper, who took a very brave and active part, saving my life, of which I will give you further details later.

After we had been on the look out for some hours our infantry put over a smoke screen. Jerry had been on the alert for several weeks, knowing too well that we had been preparing for a big offensive. In fact more than once he had put notice boards on the top of his trenches, intimating that he was already aware of our intentions and suggesting a number of likely dates for the offensive to take place. Being in such readiness, he at once realized what we were at. His artillery opened fire on our front-line trenches, many shells getting direct hits on our "O.P ." We at once made for our dug-out.

Click here for rest of story

World War I and Women and Verse (Testable)

There is a strong but neglected tradition of women's poetry written in response to the events of the First World War. Many of these poems are the products of direct experience of the processes of war -- making weapons, nursing the wounded, the loss of brothers, sons, or lovers in the trenches -- by women on active service in the battle areas as well as by women involved in the war effort at home. The range of this poetry is wide. It is often experimental and in advance of the male poetic response. Some of the women poets are well known in other contexts - like Rose Macauley, Edith Nesbit, and Edith Sitwell -- others are largely unknown. It was an American woman poet, Harriet Monroe, who founded and edited Poetry, the first American periodical devoted exclusively to verse, and who published some of Rosenberg's work. Below are some examples of such works by a number of women poets of the period.

Source

World War 1 Poetry

Munition Wages
Earning high wages?
Yus, Five quid a week.
A woman, too, mind you,
I calls it dim sweet.

Ye'are asking some questions –
But bless yer, here goes:
I spends the whole racket
On good times and clothes.

Me saving? Elijah!
Yer do think I'm mad.
I'm acting the lady,
But – I ain't living bad.

I'm having life's good times.
See 'ere, it's like this:
The 'oof come o' danger,
A touch-and-go bizz.

We're all here today, mate,
Tomorrow – perhaps dead,
If Fate tumbles on us
And blows up our shed.

Afraid! Are yer kidding?
With money to spend!
Years back I wore tatters,
Now – silk stockings, mi friend!

I've bracelets and jewellery,
Rings envied by friends;
A sergeant to swank with,
And something to lend.

I drive out in taxis,
Do theatres in style.
And this is mi verdict –
It is jolly worth while.

Worth while, for tomorrow
If I'm blown to the sky,
I'll have repaid mi wages
In death – and pass by.

Madeline Ida Bedford

Virgie Bell's View: Old Teeth

I have now finished all the books written by Herman Wouk. The last was a satire called Aurora Dawn and it was by far my least favorite. However, at his worst, he cannot begin to be as low as the one I am reading now. This one is called Flesh and Bones by Jefferson Bass. It will never cease to amaze me how much an atheist really hates to come across anything that calls for a belief in God. He gives all the scientific reasons that make him such an expert in the field of evolution. This is one book that I would not recommend to anyone unless they have a good Bible background. In the first place, he calls creation "Dumb Design." He bases this on the fact of the teeth in mammals millions of years ago. I recently reported that the smartest scientist in the world through out history believed in a creator. Einstein said that nature proved over and over again that there is a master designer. He said that it was not miracles that proved it to him, but rather the fact that nature followed such a perfect set of rules and that it could never have been something less than Intelligent Design, nevertheless, I do thoroughly enjoy forensic science.

The author is the one who gave birth to the famous Body Farm in Tennessee. It is really amazing how brilliant someone can be in one area and yet so completely void of the slightest understanding concerning the Word of God. Mr. Bass’s credentials fall significantly below that of Albert Einstein. We are supposed to have evolved from four-legged creatures into something much less suited to the environment than when we jumped from tree to tree. Oh well, it seems to be that this kind of literature becomes more entrenched in society, which the Bible tells us will happen. Here is the thing I find hard to understand. If I am wrong then I will never know it. If Mr. Bass is wrong then he will burn in hell. Why take a chance on eternity? If anyone asks you what is different in our design than that of the animal forefathers they believe in, it is this. Human blood has a clotting factor that is missing in the entire animal kingdom. We are flesh of His Flesh and Blood of His Blood. Also it is not meant that we understand. It is a question of faith. Faith has no place in science. Science is pure theory, which is no fact at all, but just speculation.

I finally looked up Al Sharpton’s credentials for the use of the term “Reverend.” He said that he preached his first sermon at the age of four. He became an ordained minister at the age of nine years. How utterly ridiculous.

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