Veterans...Get the hell in here now!

Fighter pilot Bud Anderson, the last of the WWII triple aces, dies at 102

Read more at: https://www.stripes.com/veterans/obituaries/2024-05-19/triple-ace-bud-anderson-dies-13908519.html
Source - Stars and Stripes

At our local Home Depot the employees put together an impromptu memorial in one of the reserved Veteran's spaces. That was very thoughtful and appreciated.

Wonder if Halsey, Spruance, Nimitz and Mitscher would agree?
Not that Coral Sea or Midway or Leyte Gulf were stressful or anything..

BarnBuster said:

"I sat on a flak jacket in the vague hope that a slug coming up through the ship’s soft aluminum belly wouldn’t make me a eunuch."

I Volunteered for This Mission. I Could Take Photographs That Might Outlive Me.

Drowning in fear and self-loathing, I reminded myself why I was here. Why I was in Vietnam. On this helicopter. Why I had volunteered for this mission.

thewarhorse.org

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My UPT instructor used to tell me that you sat on your flak jacket and you knew someone had been around awhile if he had two flak jackets, one to sit on and one to wear. LOL he had two and lost one when he rode his B-24 down on the French coast. Luckily the underground got him out and he was returned to fly test at Edwards and the rest is history LOL.

"Wounds my heart with a monotonous languor."
—BBC message for French Resistance fighters, informing them that the invasion was on. June 6, 1944

"This is a very serious business."
—Photographer Robert Capa on Omaha Beach. (Capa landed with the first wave of troops. Although he took over 150 photos under sustained, murderous enemy fire, only a few of them were ultimately successfully developed. A impatient darkroom technician back in London tried to rush the process overheating the negatives and causing the emulsion to melt, ruining and blurring the photos. BB)

"You get your ass on the beach. I’ll be there waiting for you and I’ll tell you what to do. There ain’t anything in this plan that is going to go right."
—Col. Paul R. Goode, addressing the 175th Infantry Regiment, 29th Infantry Division, before D-Day.

"I’m sorry we’re a few minutes late."
— Lord Lovat, arriving with his commandos to relieve the British airborne troops holding the Orne River bridges, 6 June 44.

"The first twenty-four hours of the invasion will be decisive. . . . The fate of Germany depends on the outcome. For the Allies as well as Germany, it will be the longest day."
—Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, 22 April 1944.

"We’ll start the war from right here."
—Brig. Gen. Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., assistant commander of the Fourth Infantry Division, upon finding that his force had been landed in the wrong place on Utah Beach.

"They fight not for the lust of conquest. They fight to end conquest. They fight to liberate."
— President Franklin D. Roosevelt, radio broadcast, June 6, 1944