Never Would Have Imagined …

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The ink is not yet wet on the contract, but I will be printing one out and signing it this weekend.

Last week, a journalist contacted me: Would I be interested in writing for a particular website? Sure, I replied, if they’re interested in me, I would reciprocate the interest. For money, he explained.

I was not listening to a vinyl record at that moment, but a needle scratched to a halt somewhere in the world just then. “What’s that again?”
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JFK at 100: A Personal Reflection

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

President John F. Kennedy laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery on Memorial Day 1963. The photo at top is from that day, May 30, 1963. By the end of that year, President Kennedy joined the company of dead service members buried there.

President Kennedy would be 100 today, which coincidentally is this year’s Memorial Day.
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For Those Left Behind: Memorial 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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