Well done Bernard Jordan
 
From BBC News: D-Day: Hove veteran disappears for Normandy trip
 
A hero in a world of few.
 

This was a moving story too about a WWII vet.
 
I grew up with and had many Navajo friends and only learned a few of their
words...and never learned to speak them correctly.

Hi,
 
I find these nice, and heart warming. But it tells you how disrespectful and reckless a lot of rest homes are in relation to things like this and a person's past and their history. Most of these institutions do not give a damn ... and the person is there waiting for the reaper, and the sooner the better!
 
It's just so sad. A person, honoring other fallen friends and the memories that he has lived with all his life ... and in the end, the folks in the home are denying him/them, the one chance they have to make a meaningful gesture.
 
You can't even write a song about that!
 
Ange - Emile Jacotey -- the album was done almost 20 years before Roger Waters, and the big anthem in the side 2 is "Ego et Deus" ... which is the theme of all wars out there! Hope that you can hear this album, because it is magnificent.

Great stories, guys.  This one is nice, too.  
 
http://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2014/jun/06/d-day-anniversary-89-year-old-veteran-parachutes-normandy-video
 

Hi,
 
If you guys have a chance the story of "Emile Jacotey" is a real one from WW1, and it is in French, but the gest of it is that he survived a blast in his bunker when others didn't. The music is in between his bits and it is really well done. It's not pretentious. It's just a shame that it is in French, and not enough folks will understand it, and appreciate the beauty in it.
 
It is by far one of the best "memorials" ever done in music for individuals and what they fought for, something that too many times, we all take for granted.
 
Roger's version is nice, but is very general in concept and not complete, though it has a massive song about the Tianamman Square thing, that is very good. But not enough!

When my dad was stuck in a facility for Alzheimer's victims I used to go there and play the piano for them. (Great audience, too; if you ran out of songs you could just repeat them and nobody'd notice.)
 
Sometimes, they'd have lucid moments where they'd tell me about their lives. I'd look around the room and realize that every one of them had experienced things you and I cannot even imagine: hardships and adventures and being eyewitness to epic events.
 
My mother-in-law told me about escaping into the Philippine mountains on foot, just miles ahead of the invading Japanese army - while 8 months pregnant. Her brother told me about being on the hit list of a Japanese assassination squad because he had previously worked for the Americans. A friend of my father's had hidden out in the jungles of Mindanao for three years, working with the local resistance to sabotage and spy upon the occupying forces - at the age of 19.
 
Next time you have an opportunity to talk to someone in their 90's, get out your Zoom H1 and let them ramble. It will profoundly change your own perspectives.

bitflipper
Next time you have an opportunity to talk to someone in their 90's, get out your Zoom H1 and let them ramble. It will profoundly change your own perspectives.

Absolutely....There is so much we can learn from them. Unfortunately, many people don't give them the time of day.

Heh, heh.....I saw that on the local news yesterday - great story.

A hero then, and a hero now. 

Leadfoot

bitflipper
Next time you have an opportunity to talk to someone in their 90's, get out your Zoom H1 and let them ramble. It will profoundly change your own perspectives.

Absolutely....There is so much we can learn from them. Unfortunately, many people don't give them the time of day.

My dad was a part of WW2 in some form that he never discussed or is not written about, as he was an Engineer in the Portuguese Navy -- and the stories of all these things were never discussed or mentioned. However, the movies in the 1950's and early 1960's were brutal about WW2 and its aftermath, and you can go way back to "Kanal" and many other films. Up until 1999 or so, the Film Festival here in Portland still showed a film or two that dealt with effects of the WW2 and its people.
 
Because America has two oceans on each side, the chances that anything like WW1 or WW2 to take place is much smaller and difficult. The sad part is that we have no idea of how brutal and horrendous the whole thing can be, and the TV thing in the late 60's begun showing us a lot about VietNam that helped the world learn about it ... but all it accomplished in America was a bunch of religions and factions hide it all even more.