American Airlines Flight 587 crashed soon after taking off from John F. Kennedy International Airport 15 years ago today. Two-hundred-fifty-one passengers, nine crew, and five people on the ground in the Belle Harbor area of Queens died.
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The Ellis Island Immigrant Station (photo at top) was closed as a processing center on this date in 1954.
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“Their life consisted wholly and solely of war, for they were and always had been front-line infantrymen. They survived because the fates were kind to them, certainly—but also because they had become hard and immensely wise in animal-like ways of self-preservation.”—Ernie Pyle, World War II journalist, writing about what he saw at the front. Killed in action April 18, 1945.
I do not come from a family that talks much about its military service. My father was drafted in 1958, served his two-year-long tour, and then came back home to a job that had been held for him. This was during the Cold War, so he did not see action but he did see more of the world than he had up till then, or since. He served in the U.S. Army in Germany during the Cold War as a calculator tasked with determining missile flight paths. (I believe he worked with the Atlas missile, an early ICBM model.)
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Today is Veterans Day. It was established to honor the date World War I ended in 1918: “at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month,” or 11:00 a.m. on 11/11. It celebrates all who have served, in any era, in any of the services. (Photo at top is my great-uncle’s grave in France.)
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World War I ended on this date in 1918. The total number killed in the four years of war: 11 million military personnel and seven million civilians. Fighting took place in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia. Sea battles were fought in the Mediterranean Sea and on the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The 1918 flu pandemic that killed between 50 and 100 million individuals that year was helped in its deadly course by the conflict.
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