Remembrance Day

[foragefarmer]

Let's all be grateful to all the women and men who have serve this country so bravely and honorable. Past and present.

We all have friends and family who have served this great country. Please any one with stories or memories WHO WANT share by all means I would be grateful to hear them. Thank you

Thanks to them we have such a great country to live in. Canada the Best.

[farmaholic]

So true, I saw a show last night on CBC(no crass comments please) called The Passionate Eye. It was highlighting the rise of ISIS and the insanity that is taking place there. We have so much to be grateful for and have no idea what true loss of freedom really is. Thank God my predecessors chose Canada. The potholes on the road of life here don't come close to the craters on their road of life. One of the most striking differences was how things looked there, for a part of the world that has been "civilized" for centuries before here, WOW what an ugly visual mess. Probably the result of nonstop fighting.

So, thank you to all the Service Men and Women who make this country one of the best in the world to live in.

[foragefarmer]

I had a neighbor who fought in WWII. He was from small town SK and enlisted at the age of 16 as he came from a large family that was very poor. He lied about his age just so he could get away. He told me it was his chance to see the world even if it meant to fight in a war. I personally could not imagine myself at 16 doing such brave, crazy thing. But he did it.

One day he was talking a little bit of some of the happenings of the war and he said to me I have something to show you. He went into a closet in his house and pulled out a Nazi Swastika Flag that he had taken when fighting. It was about four or five feet wide by about 10 feet in length.

He was one of the nicest guys you ever met and sadly died in 1997. I was so lucky and honored to have known him.

Rest in peace my dear friend. I will never forget what you did for me and this country.

[grassfarmer]

We rented pasture off an old German guy in Scotland for a few years. He was just the gentlest, quiet old man. We knew he had been a POW that had married the farmers daughter and stayed on after the war but when you heard his whole story it gave a face to "the other side" in WW1 and 11.
They were a farming family in Germany and were not keen participants in WW1 but he and his 4 brothers were all conscripted and his 4 were brothers were killed then.
The remaining brother was the father of this old guy we knew and when WW2 was obviously about to start he was just distraught - again they just wanted to be left alone on the farm but his 4 sons were conscripted and 3 were to die by the time the war was over.

This old guy made a new home in Scotland and was accepted there in the farming community while his ancestral land in Germany was lost forever, being behind the Iron Curtain for many years.

RIP Franz.

[parsley]

Aunty died yesterday at the age of 96. An excerpt from her son: "Mother joined the Canadian Air Force in 1941 and was a corporal, stationed in Washington DC where she translated top secret documents passed between the Pentagon (she still has her pass) and the Canadian military. The military taught her to smoke and to drink (never with boys, she says) and to stand in line. I suspect her brothers taught her to swear. One story she loved to tell was when a rather pompous American Captain arrived and wouldn't hand over a document as she was just a Corporal. "I need to give this to the Captain" he said. She got her Captain, and when he arrived and took possession of the document, he handed it right over and said, "decode this corporal".

May we always understand why we enjoy the life we live. Pars.

[Braveheart]

My maternal Grandfather was wounded in the hand at Vimy Ridge. Once the wound was dressed, he was reassigned to help with the ambulances. A gas attack then took him out of WW1. In WW2, he re enlisted and was part of the home guard, guarding POWs.

I remember as a boy, he was often absent. The damage done to his lungs by the gas left him with breathing problems. He spent a lot of time in a sanatorium.

My wife's' uncle was killed in Germany in the last days of WW2. The family really never recovered from the loss. Tragedy like that echoes through generations.

[hedgehog]

The most moving memorial i have seen is to the newfoundland regiment who were wiped out on the somme. There is a big statue of a moose looking over the former battlefield.
The generals should have been strung up for those stupid suicide attacks.
It seems that if they needed a particularly difficuilt position taken, they brought in the canadians as they were better at fighting.