Thanks for the memories...

[jhetley]

I've been trying, off and on, to watch the PBS series on WW II by Ken Burns.  Each time I flip over to it, I get too depressed after a few minutes and quit.  Mountains of pain and bungling and malice and waste.

I knew those people.  Father-in-law is a navy vet from The War, we threw out Elder Sister's ration-books when cleaning out Mom's house, I grew up down the street from a survivor of the Bataan Death March and just about every childhood friend had a veteran in the family.  Some were older brothers rather than fathers or uncles.  Military portraits framed in black.  Anti-tank shells and grenades (deactivated, I hope, but ...) for paperweights in a lot of home offices and dens.  Japs and Huns were demons.

Waste.  Pain.  Hate.  Death.

ADDENDUM

Our history courses in school were always paced so we didn't get any further than WW I -- if that.  Cynical me, I suspected that the main reason was so that teachers didn't have to deal with parents who lived through the period and knew an alternate reality to the official one.  After all, we had Spanish-American War vets in the family...

Comments

[sclerotic-rings.livejournal.com]

Interesting: I always thought that the delay was just something I kept running into, because I took three history courses in middle school/high school (the effects of moving through three states between 1978 and 1980) that always stopped at the same point. In my case, though, I was always amazed that American History classes ended with the end of World War II, with no discussion of the Marshall Plan or Korea, and definitely not a mention of my most burning question at the time: "Just why the hell did we go to Vietnam?"

[wcg.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've known a number of veterans of WW II over the years. Even had a few of them among my troops when I was a battalion commander in the MDDF back a few years ago. (And you can bet that was an odd feeling.)

I haven't watched any of the PBS special. Might do so someday. I don't know.

I guess I took history a few years after you did. We actually got into WW II, through it, and into the post-war US of the late 1940s. I never learned anything about the Korean War (other than that it happened) until I saw MASH. It just somehow didn't make it into the curriculum. My guess is that it was within the direct experience of the people who were teaching me.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

The _textbooks_ went on for several decades beyond WW I, but the courses never did. You know enough about course outlines and schedules to realize that was no accident.