The War

Lately, I've been thinking about The War. Not the war in Iraq though it crosses my mind almost daily too. It's hard to not think about it when there are articles like in today's Washington Post. I remember a few years ago when a military official said that the Pentagon did not keep count of civilian deaths in Iraq. It's seems the military is now counting the dead as a metric to see if the surge is working. Grim business indeed. But, lately I am also thinking about THE WAR the Ken Burns documentary on PBS. Mostly I think of my Aunt out in the mid west. Eighty Four years old and still sharp as a tack. She enlisted in the Navy in World War II and was station in Norfolk. She preformed inspections on planes that were repaired and sent back into duty. She tells the story of getting into a recently repaired plane during the war with her clip board to do an in flight check of the repairs on some plane. Only to have the plane crash into the bay. Luckily, she and the crew were rescued. But, I also think of her in our last conversation about a month ago when she said. You know I want to throw everyone on Capitol Hill into the Potomic River. I told her I know the feeling.