Re: Band of Brothers


Subject: Re: Band of Brothers
From: Scottie Bowman (rbowman@indigo.ie)
Date: Tue Oct 09 2001 - 03:39:27 GMT


    ‘... when I asked them the same question & they explained
    gently that ‘you probably had to be there ...''

    OK, the words are my own.

    But. And it’s a big but.

    How come that, having said that, they then poured us both
    another drink & sat on into the early hours doing their utmost
    to show me just precisely how it HAD been; how those days
    had marked the high noon of their lives, illuminating & setting
    in place all subsequent experience?

    Both Paul & Tim tell us they’re grateful not to have been so
    challenged. And surely we all feel this in our bones. But I certainly
    also feel – along with many of my generation, just too young
    for the second world war & just too old for subsequent ones –
    that I missed what so many of my elders regard as the defining
    event of their lives; & that I’m thereby diminished forever
    in some very central way.

    I simply can’t get over them:
    Oliver Wendell Holmes: ‘We have shared the incommunicable
    experience of war. We have felt – we still feel – the passion
    of life to its top ...'
    Leonard Cheshire VC (our nearest approximation to a modern
    day saint): ‘Nothing in my life gave greater satisfaction than
    strategic bombing ...'
    And, a little less articulately, many of my friends.

    My guess is that without that mortar wound on the Piave,
    we’d never have lived ‘In our Time’ & without the Hurtgen Forest
    we’d never have met Holden.

    Scottie B.

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