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Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 328
enthusiast
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enthusiast
Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 328 |
> I love you, Uncle Bill.You took the words right out of my mouth! I love you, Uncle Bill. [slightly belated Valentine emoticon] And who ever said I was pretty? 
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Joined: Oct 2000
Posts: 5,400
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Oct 2000
Posts: 5,400 |
Age stepping in here-- (and i am guess here-- i did go to college as an adult-- but i still suspect i am older than you!)-- Beauty is in the eye of the beholder-- So we all-- get to deside if you are beautiful!
As you get older or if lucky, wiser when still young-- you'll learn, never disagree when a gentleman calls you beautiful!
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Joined: Nov 2000
Posts: 3,439
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Nov 2000
Posts: 3,439 |
PFC is the designation for Private First Class . One stripe with pointy part up (chevron for the Brits) as designator on sleeves.
Those entering the service as enlisted men/women are all Privates. No insignia of rank.
Therefore, it may be deduced that Wintegreen was once a PFC and had his rank reduced as a disiplinary measure. Private is low man on the totem pole!
Reduction in rank for infractions of the UCMJ (Uniform Code of Military Justice) is "to encourage the others."
although it sounds much classier in French. "Pour encorage les autres" if spelling wrong, please correct.
wow
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Joined: Jul 2000
Posts: 1,094
old hand
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old hand
Joined: Jul 2000
Posts: 1,094 |
One stripe with pointy part up (chevron for the Brits) as designator on sleeves.
So that's where the gas company got its logo.
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Joined: Nov 2000
Posts: 3,439
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Nov 2000
Posts: 3,439 |
No corrections on my French?
Mon goodness! How did that happen?
wow
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Joined: Nov 2000
Posts: 3,146
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Nov 2000
Posts: 3,146 |
Okay, Rapunzel, I'll let my hair down.
Ex-PFC Wintergreen was the most cynical of enlisted men, who saw the futility of the war but was caught up in it all anyway. So he alternately was the local savant - he knew what General Dreedle was going to do before General Dreedle did - and the bad soldier, getting made up to PFC, then going over the hill for a while, getting busted back to private and being sentenced to dig and fill in holes. When he was asked by Captain Yossarian why he did it, he replied "Somebody's got to."
It was never clear, quite deliberately, I'm sure, whether he was referring to the implied one-man protest movement (going over the hill) or digging and filling in the holes.
I didn't LIU so the detail may be slightly out, but that's the gist.
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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Joined: Nov 2000
Posts: 3,439
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Nov 2000
Posts: 3,439 |
As soon as the roads are passable (we had *another eight inches of snow overnight) I'm going to the Library and borrow Joe Heller's "Catch 22" and re-read it.
"Save the Bombardier!"
wow
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Joined: Nov 2000
Posts: 3,439
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Nov 2000
Posts: 3,439 |
For a look at the early war in Vietnam, and some dark humor close to the Heller mold ... "Air America" ... the book and the movie.
Anybody see/read it?
From my brother, who was there in 1957/58 and 64/65, I heard some even stranger stories than those in the book.
wow
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Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 13,858
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 13,858 |
"I didn't LIU so the detail may be slightly out, but that's the gist."
"gist" That's a very handy word. I have seen many wordy sentences that should have been vigorously pruned so that the "gist" could be discerned more easily.
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Joined: Nov 2000
Posts: 3,146
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Nov 2000
Posts: 3,146 |
I've read Air America and some of the things related in it were pretty odd. It was purportedly "non-fiction", but I think that its author (who from memory was a British journalist) was told some fairly resounding tarradiddles. The movie of the same name was utter rubbish IMHO.
One bit rang true, however. Shortly after the end of the war when the North Vietnamese Army had invaded Cambodia, the author was in a taxi travelling from Bangkok airport into the city. He asked the taxi driver if he was worried that the NVA might not stop at the Cambodian border, to which the taxi driver replied that he wasn't worried by that possiblity at all, since the NVA couldn't possibly cope with Bangkok rush-hour traffic.
For a Catch-22-like book on Vietnam, I suggest you read Brandywine's War (again, forget the author's name), although it isn't a patch on Catch-22 itself.
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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