Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- Part one War is a Terrible Thing!
- Part Two Guarding One’s Humanity During War: World War II
- 2 If Something’s Going to Get You, It’ll Get You
- 3 Prejudice, Bigotry, and Hatred. Love and Luck
- 4 Everything Went Downhill after that
- 5 In the Middle of a Hailstorm, One doesn’t Fear for One’s Own Life
- 6 Belonging to Something
- 7 Hard to Adjust After all that
- Part Three Other Voices, Other Wars: From Indochina to Iraq
- Part Four Civil Wars and Genocides, Dictators and Domestic Oppressors
- Part Five My Story, Your Choice How to Use it
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Acknowledgments by the Senior Author
- Index
2 - If Something’s Going to Get You, It’ll Get You
Frank, American Soldier in the South Pacific
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2014
- Frontmatter
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- Part one War is a Terrible Thing!
- Part Two Guarding One’s Humanity During War: World War II
- 2 If Something’s Going to Get You, It’ll Get You
- 3 Prejudice, Bigotry, and Hatred. Love and Luck
- 4 Everything Went Downhill after that
- 5 In the Middle of a Hailstorm, One doesn’t Fear for One’s Own Life
- 6 Belonging to Something
- 7 Hard to Adjust After all that
- Part Three Other Voices, Other Wars: From Indochina to Iraq
- Part Four Civil Wars and Genocides, Dictators and Domestic Oppressors
- Part Five My Story, Your Choice How to Use it
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Acknowledgments by the Senior Author
- Index
Summary
You should probably realize that I’m eighty-nine, so that gives you a perspective. When I grew up we didn't have television or a lot of other things that we all take for granted today. As a matter of fact, when I was growing up we still had horse carts delivering things in various neighborhoods. My father was a Navy Chief Petty Officer. That's like a Master Sergeant in the Army; it's the top-ranked enlisted man. He had been in the military pretty much all of his life. He ran away to the Spanish-American War when he was seventeen. He lied about his age and told them he was nineteen so they’d take him. He spent three years in the Philippines, during which time the Spanish were defeated at the Battle of Manila, which was a presage to what we have today. When the Americans threw the Spanish out, the Filipinos weren't all that interested in just trading them for Americans as colonial masters. They wanted to be independent so there was a Philippine insurrection led by a man named Aguinaldo. My father was in the 13th Minnesota Regiment, along with the Dakota regiments. Many of the senior enlisted men and officers were old Indian fighters who had fought the Sioux on the plains in the 1870s and 1880s, so they had experience in, as they put it, “good old fighting.”
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- Chapter
- Information
- A Darkling PlainStories of Conflict and Humanity during War, pp. 39 - 54Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014