Will Dabbs

I would love to be able to sit down with James Sullivan and Gene Stoner. I would ask them if they had any inkling of the chaos their remarkable little rifle might someday foment.

My buddy Sario Caravalho is a fascinating guy. Born and raised in Hawaii, he was one of the US Army’s first Green Berets.

Jack Churchill opted for an English longbow and a Scottish broadsword. Additionally, where normal people might wield such stuff for show, Jack Churchill did not. He used these antiquated weapons to get medieval on the Germans.

The Purple Heart was awarded retroactively for wounds received during World War 1. MacArthur himself was the first recipient. It was standardized across all services in December of 1942. However, the Purple Heart is a military award no sensible person covets.

When she came of age, Jo enrolled in law school intending to become a human rights lawyer. While studying law she developed friendships with several Jewish students. In the late 1930’s with persecution of the Jews on the rise across Europe, Jo felt energized to support them.  

It is tough to believe that, even this deep into the enlightened Information Age, nations can yet still go to war simply because a single charismatic lunatic wants them to.

Maybe it’s the movies. We inexplicably expect life to be clean, tidy, and clear-cut. It just isn’t. It is so much easier to process the world around us when we fractionate people into all good or all bad.

Thursday, 21 October 2021, a handgun went off during the filming of the Alec Baldwin Western movie Rust. The cast and crew were rehearsing an upcoming scene inside a chapel used as a set for the film. The weapon was in Baldwin’s hands when it discharged.

It is difficult to appreciate the scope of World War 2. We modern folk simply have no frame of reference. It was death, tragedy, and destruction on a scale beyond our imagining.