memorial day

I tried to think of something pithy to say about Memorial Day and after about the tenth draft, I decided to let the troops speak for themselves. These are letters to my charity Books For Soldiers.

Check them after the flip

Teen PTSD researcher Ilana Rice

Why do I get the feeling you two are destined to meet? And by all means don't change your first names!

Many already know Ilona Meagher, many have worked with her, and she posts on many of these boards, when not the busy young lady she's become with her dedication to her new found much needed cause as she joined many of us who had already been trying to get others to pay attention to. She has done wonders, as have all those who joined her from ePluribus Media, in their research and their PTSD, and other, Timelines which are used by many.

Crossposted from Left Toon Lane, Bilerico Project & My Left Wing


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This was posted at ScruHoo all day, but I wanted to share it here.

Keeping Quiet by Pablo Neruda

Crossposted from Left Toon Lane & My Left Wing


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No journalist has ever captured the reality of war like Ernest Taylor Pyle, who lived — and died — among the soldiers he covered.
From his column Brave Men:

Even after a winter of living with wholesale death and vile destruction, it is only spasmodically that I seem capable of realizing how real and how awful this war is. My emotions seem dead and crusty when presented with the tangibles of war. I find I can look on rows of fresh graves without a lump in my throat. Somehow I can look on mutilated bodies without flinching or feeling deeply.

It is only when I sit alone away from it all, or lie at night in my bedroll recreating with closed eyes what I have seen, thinking and thinking and thinking, that at last the enormity of all these newly dead strikes like a living nightmare.

Crossposted from Left Toon Lane & My Left Wing


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