Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Perspective

This weekend a friend brought over a DVD of the History Channel show "Dogfights!" which is a pretty cool infotainment series. Kinda like "Wings: The Next Generation". So he pops in the one about Guadalcanal, and it's going over some of the background of the campaign while setting up the arena for some nice CGI F4F Wildcat vs. Ki-43 "Oscar" furballing.

We were watching some stock footage of a pair of Marines advancing through the jungle hip firing a Browning .30cal and I kinda chortled. The guys asked me why I was laughing, thinking it was going to be a gun-guy comment about the Browning or some such.

And I just shook my head and said that those guys lived in shit and mud for months on end, took fire, had 8 kinds of dysentary and skin rot, weighed 150 pounds soaking wet and probably hadn't had a hot meal in a week, and there they are, assault firing with a .30cal MG because the goddamned Japs have part of a goddamned island in the goddamned Solomons. And I'm feeling pissy about my job today.

Bottom line is, I was laughing at myself as compared to those guys, or the millions of guys just like them. And perspective is good.

2 comments:

MeatAxe said...

I just started watching this series on Netflix, where you can get it "instantly". Its awesome.

Atom Smasher said...

yeah, I just caved in and bought it on Amazon. Stupid Amazon.

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