B. U. G. S.

I was raised around what I call “professional World War II veterans.” These were men who fought in WW2 and have had no life since. According to them, if you weren’t in WW2, you didn’t know what real life was all about.

I was talking to one of the more pathetic of those guys and mentioned a friend of mine who was the only soldier in his unit to come back on his feet from a battle in the Korean War. The professional WW2 vet replied, “He wasn’t in a real war, he was in a police action. I was in The WAR.”

True, not all WW2 vets are that callous and stupid. But I have never heard ONE SINGLE member of the group that calls itself The Greatest Generation have the moral courage to contradict this kind of statement by a “professional WW2 veteran.”

And plenty of them were sitting right there when the professional WW2 vets told me nobody else had been “in combat” but them.

You might as well spit on Korean War vets’ graves.

This is another reason why I have a low opinion of the group that calls itself The Greatest Generation.

My brother-in-law served in WW2 in the Merchant Marine. He insists he was “never in combat.”

He didn’t have to tell me that. Very few men who were in the Merchant Marine were “in combat” and lived to tell about it. “Combat” meant they were attacked by a submarine. Very few of the men who were on a Merchant Marine ship that got attacked by a submarine are around to talk about it.

No, my brother-in-law was not “in combat.” He just risked a horrible death at sea, never knowing when, day or night, his ship might go down under him.

For excellent reasons, I can only reveal that I have almost certainly have never been in a fire-fight that involved as many as two hundred combatants on both sides. My WW2 friends told me I had never really been “in combat.”

You sure could have fooled me.

I also knew some of the people who were trying to kill my brother-in-law. One of them was serving on a German submarine at the age of thirteen. He showed an understandable reluctance to talk about how much experience he had had “in combat.” He would have had to tell me about his success in killing people like us.

The death rate in the AMERICAN submarine corps in WW2 was one in seven. The death rate among Germans was more like 50%. And it was horrible way to die down there.

Professional American WW2 vets would probably say that all this German submariner ever did was help run the submarine while it shot torpedoes at Allied ships. He wasn’t really “in combat” unless he had been fired back at.

But he was in the same position as my brother-in-law. Very few German submarine crews who had depth charges dropped at them lived to tell about it.

So even he, a man who was in The Real War, was never really “in combat.”

Let me tell you something: I would FAR rather be in a fire-fight out in the field than sitting on a ship for months waiting day and night for a torpedo to send me to a cold drowning death. And I would take either option long before I would be willing be go down in a sub and spend months waiting for a suffocating death down there.

But what would I know? I’ve never been a Real War.