V-E Day

I think they don't want ya stealin' their bandwidth, Boss . . . i don't see no pics, just a word which is incomprehensible to me . . .

Set - I saw that. Very strange. Scared me LOL.

One of the images which you have linked quotes the Canadian poet, John McCrae. McCrea served in the Boer War and in the Great War as a medical officer--ironically, he died in 1918 from pneumonia. The poem was about the Great War, but it is not inappropriate here:

In Flanders Fields (1915)

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Victory in Europe, JustWonders. perhaps those two links were exactly what we are supposed to see.

A fried egg; a grey background; and a strange word with lunch on Omaha Beach.

My mother landed on Omaha, on day 16. I see the old pictures of her, in fatigues and boots, clowning around a machine gun in the New Mexico desert, before being sent to North Africa. I see a woman, just turned 22, and wonder how that felt. She told us so many small stories which entertained us as children, but which chill my blood as a grown man who had his own war to live through.

As a boy, i wanted to be a professional soldier. The army in which i enlisted in 1970, however, was a sad, pathetic shadow of its former greatness, lacking the professionalism which its officers and NCO's have since restored, so i did not go down that road. But war haunts me, and obsesses me. I've never been to Flanders, but as Emily Dickinson wrote in Chartless,

I never saw a moor,
I never saw the sea;
Yet know I how the heather looks,
And what a wave must be.

so i can see those poppies blowing in a chilly spring wind, amid the crosses, row on row . . .

Oh, my God, Set. You combined the best of the worst:

Dear Emily--and John McCrae and your memories.

And we are left to "just wonder"........................

Setanta - thanks for the source to that beautiful quote.

The last picture on the site is that of First Lieutenant Walter Will, MOH recipient, who died 30.March.1945 -- just 5 weeks before the end.

http://www.army.mil/cmh/mohiib2.htm