On Veterans Day

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“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 in History: Nov. 11

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

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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When Will Shawkan Be Freed?

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

A journalist’s job is to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

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On the good days, the dozen prisoners negotiate their way through the impossibility of the circumstances. The bad days are simply more impossible, because even impossible situations can be made worse.

The prisoners are crowded in a space the size of a child’s bedroom, nine feet by twelve feet, which for obvious reasons does not have cots for all twelve occupants. They take turns sleeping on the cot or on spaces on the floor. A sink and toilet sit open against one wall. The prisoners take turns cooking on a two-plate electric cooker, which during the winter months has served as the unheated prison cell’s heat source.

The sky, the only way to know if it is day or night, is seen through a small gap in the iron bars in the ceiling of the cell. One prisoner wrote in 2014:
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