So much to read, so little time! It seems like I spend all my money on books. A new title caught my eye so I bought it: The Long Way Home - An American Journey from Ellis Island to the Great War. The first lines in the dust jacket of the book read “When the United States entered World War I in 1917, one-third of the nation’s population had been born overseas or had a parent who was an immigrant. At the peak of U. S. involvement in the war, nearly one in five American soldiers was foreign-born.” Since my maternal grandfather fit into that category I thought it would be informative. The author traces the lives of a dozen men, one of whom came from Norway. When I looked deeper into the tale I discovered he marched with the 362nd Regiment of the 91st Division, the same one Grandpa was a member of. Reading this account should give me a bit more insight into the sketchy history of the battles he fought in.
The 91st, identified as the Wild West Division, included a lot of cowboy types from Wyoming and Montana. One of my uncles told the story he knew of the time when Grandpa’s troop train carried the raw recruits to their training camp in Washington. At a station stop some sergeant started bawling orders at them and one of them promptly decked the sergeant. He didn’t take kindly to being ordered around. At the remaining station stops armed guards stood on the platform to keep order.
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We recently visited New Orleans, the Gulf Coast area, and Nashville. Now both are suffering through disasters. I hope they don’t think that the dark cloud follows me around and that I had something to do with it. I might want to go back sometime.
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We just finished re-watching my John Adams boxed DVD set as well as a Thomas Jefferson DVD found at the library. Without the leadership and wisdom these two men demonstrated in the early days of this country a much different government probably would have developed. I've been watching the new Tom Hanks production of "The Pacific" on HBO. The battle scenes are very graphic, but it doesn't match up to the earlier "Band of Brothers" or "Saving Private Ryan."
