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If you haven’t watched it, it’s a pretty engaging ten-hour series that follows the six-month deployment of the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz to the Persian Gulf in 2005 (you can watch the entire series over the net by following the above link). Obviously the people who made the series chose to follow the lives of [...]

So I got another two hours left for this headline to remain valid. May 8th, Victory in Europe Day. Hope yours was a happy one. In the spirit of the day: Favorite WWII European Theater of Operations Book: Up Front, Bill Mauldin Favorite WWII ETO Movie: The Great Escape or Das Boot Favorite WWII ETO [...]

This came up on my iPod at work today and it cracked me up. I’m guessing no one else will have the same reaction. Shame. I wrote this while I was taking an honors class on Beethoven my senior year in college. One day we talked about Wellington’s Victory and it sounded like it was [...]

These should be in order chronologically and it’s admittedly a little weighted toward the Pacific Theater of World War II. In case you don’t want to read to the bottom, Iraq: 3,973 deaths in 1,806 days, 2.2 deaths/day. Event US Deaths Duration Deaths/Day Lexington & Concord (Revolution) 50 1 day 50.0 Estimated death count (US [...]

And when I say “war books”, I’m talking about non-fiction stuff I’ve read as “research” for my “novel”. With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa by E. B. Sledge — Painfully unaffected first-person account of two of the bloodiest campaigns of the Pacific. It’s like being there and it’s beautiful and it sucks. If [...]

Pluses: Is actually from World War II. Vintage. Awakens ghosts. Has a bolt action! Spent shells sound cool as they fly onto the ground. Grants me libertarian Second Amendment cred. Endears me to rednecks. Is very loud. Teaches you what a “magazine cut-off switch” does. Holds up to five rounds. Cool Springfield Armory logo and [...]

I’ll start with the video this time. It’s actually compressed. Then if you’re interested, you can get my amateur historical synopsis. VIDEO (Quicktime, 4.7MB): Alligator Creek [amateur historical synopsis] Essentially at the far western end of Red Beach is Alligator Creek, which is actually the Ilu River and is known to historians as the site [...]

For some reason I thought it’d be great to see as many war sites as I could on the Fourth of July. I dunno — maybe that was a good idea. Red Beach on Guadalcanal was the Normandy of the Pacific — not in terms of battle ferocity, but in the sense that it was [...]

Late summer, early fall of 1942, the decisive land battles of the Pacific Theater were being fought on Guadalcanal. There were two key battle locations that, essentially, held the key to victory: Edson’s Ridge and the mouth of the Matanikau River. The mouth of the Matanikau was important because it was the only reasonable place [...]

So my recent fascination with WWII has resulted in the site’s new appearance. Hopefully it’s offending all the pacifists out there because, clearly, I love war and consider it the answer to all of life’s problems. Especially alcoholism. I’m also planning a trip to the Solomon Islands — no joke — so I can go [...]