Quote:
Originally Posted by Rochard
(Post 19732586)
So I can't mention Marines, military, trucks, or mustangs.
I guess that leaves me with Jeeps.
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Well... lets be honest, I don't think anyone can stop you from talking about the marines if their life depended on it.
My grandfather ran away at 16, lied about his age and joined the marines. He fought in Korea. I don't know what all he did. I know from reading his diaries that he carried a B.A.R. He eventually went to sniper school and became a sniper. He was court marshaled 3 times for going AWOL. The last time it happened, it was because his uncle was dying. This time, they were going to lock him up for good. In an event that I found very hard to believe until i saw the paperwork, General Puller himself, personally requested he be released and he sent him to korea. He has shit ton of medals. He took 3 hits and lived most of his life with one lung. He also boxed in the marines and was a golden gloves champion on the west coast - a fact i wasn't aware of until my grandmother died and he began drinking and fighting and knocking people out left and right in bars - much to the confusion and dismay of everyone around him. He was in the movie Sands of Iwo Jima (one of the many storming up and down the beach and mt and got to hang with John Wayne quite a bit). He appears in a Time Life video about the Korean War shooting a N Korean off a bridge with his M1. I've read his diaries about all the Chinese that they slaughtered as they tried to cross some river into Korea when they got involved... (too lazy to look it up) and then had to spend a couple weeks dug in surrounded by 1000s and 1000s of rotting corpses.. all through that, he wrote a lot of very funny jokes in his diary, about what was going on in spite of being surrounded by so much horror, which was kind of interesting and macabre to read as people tried to stay sane in the middle of nothing but insanity. He also wrote a lot about the winter in Korea and surviving that and how it killed more of his friends than N Koreans or Chinese.
He never really talked about any of it. He didn't run around reminding people every chance he got. He never ran around yelling "Semper Fi!" He didn't have retarded stickers all over his vehicles... or a retarded veterans license plate to remind everyone by the 1000s every time he went to the store.
Making the choice as a "child" as you keep putting it and joining the marines at age 17, doesn't make a person heroic. Running away from home isn't an act that should command respect, no matter where that naive child ran to. It's nothing more than a dipshit kid making decisions for which he has zero understanding of the consequences of. It's not an act to be proud of anymore than any other decision that a 17 year old makes.
A true hero is most often, the person who denies he's a hero. The one who never talks about his deeds. The one who is too humble to remind others.
I truly never game much thought to how exceptional he was until I started seeing others blather on and on, non-stop reminding others at every possibility, of their non achievements, continually demanding others acknowledgement.
Had I ever told my grandfather that he was a hero, he most likely would have just smiled and sheepishly made some self deprecating joke,.. probably that he was nothing more an runaway asshole kid with a gun, that got lucky.
He never once showed me all his medals while he was alive.
