Lest We Forget

Sippican Cottage has a post about his father, a WWII veteran, and his visit to see on of the few remaining B-24 bombers in which he flew 40 missions as ball-turret gunner.

My father was a ball gunner on a B-24J Liberator bomber in the Pacific during WW2. He rarely spoke about that. My father and his confreres considered themselves part of a thing greater than the sum of their parts in it --or so it seems to me -- and more or less did what was expected of them as a sort of unpleasant chore, kept themselves safe as much as was practicable, amused themselves when possible, and got back to being regular people as soon as they could.

The Greatest Generation is rapidly disappearing. We will have lost something irreplaceable when they're gone. The represent something nearly gone from our nation, something we will miss dearly once we realize what we've lost.