Omaha Steve (46,944 posts) Tue Feb 10, 2015, 06:59 PM
35. My dad got one of these!!!
My dad in the 40's couldn't email home. No phone calls. No trips home in 5 years.
Wow! I didn't realize email capability and cell phones warded off IED blast & shrapnel, RPGs, and AK47 rounds! Cool!
Let me calculate for a moment ... the US entered WW2 on December 8, 1941 ... Germany surrendered May 8, 1945 ... Japan surrendered August 14th, 1945 (the 15th west of the International Dateline) ......... I need help! I can't even get that to add up to 4 years!
Worse still, the USN rotated ships home for repairs and rebuilds - planned and unplanned - during the war, including submarines and crews, and did the same with carrier air groups. I suspect the Marines, USA, and USAAC did similarly. After the War deployments were probably on the order of a couple of years, so
I'll give OS this much. The US usually provides more "amenities" (if such a word can be applicable in a combat zone) to its military personnel than is common among other nations. Thing is, that was true back in WW2, and the Germans and Japanese (not those facing them, of course!) thought US soldiers, Marines, airmen, and sailors soft because of it.
Being a technoid life-form, my brain wandered back again to Math. Suppose, for the sake of discussion, OS's father served in WW2, was deployed in early 1942, and OS actually remembers a 5-year paternal absence. That would mean OS was born around 1937 (1942 - 5 = 1937). Those numbers would make OS about 77YO. Is he really that age?
From his snark about email and phones to the 5-year deployment claim to the age he would have to be for the claim to have a chronological possibility this post has
scrawled all over it. OS sure has contempt for his DU audience's ignorance of history and things military.