Reposted from comments in the Morning Briefing:

I’m working in the Somme region of France and had the chance to visit several Great War cemeteries, memorials, and battlefields last week with some German coworkers. Incredible. Heartbreaking.

The worst thing about it? It didn’t need to happen. This war was solely fought over politics and land. A terrible waste. And whose to know? If England and the United States had chosen sides differently, Europe might very well have followed a different path altogether. Indeed, even within historical context, one has to ask what we were thinking when we supported the Third Republic instead of the Kaiser. If we had chosen differently, we may never have had Fascist Germany, Soviet Russia, or so many of the other evils that we know have. The pathetic German groveling would not have started. The insatiable French pride would have been vanquished, yet history tells us they probably would have maintained their identity. Spain and Eastern Europe would have been spared decades of dictatorship.

Having spent some much time touring the area, I don’t believe we should have ever gotten involved in this conflict.

But only a few miles away, one can find memorials, cemeteries, and battlefields dedicated to the other World War. In this war, there was a real evil. An ideology that screamed for the death of those in its way, for the suppression and destruction of thought, ideas, and liberty. It was, though many refuse to understand, a religious war. I, and most Americans, regret that we didn’t get involved sooner.

There are lessons to be learned here. The wars we are fighting now, and that we will need to fight in the future, are they more like World War II or the Great War? Liberal media and academia insist they bear similarities to the Great War. They refuse to see that we are now fighting an ideology, a religion, which demands the death of those in its way, the suppression and destruction of thought, ideas, and liberty. In reality, our current situation bears much more resemblance to the Second World War than the Great War. The lesson must be learned and quickly if we are to survive.

All our veterans today.

We count the weeks no more. It was winter when
I came up, and when the shells exploded the
frozen clods of earth were just as dangerous as the
fragments. Now the trees are green again. Our life
alternates between billets and the front. We have
almost grown accustomed to it; war is a cause of
death like cancer and tuberculosis, like influenza and
dysentery. The deaths are merely more frequent,
more varied and terrible.

Go Bless. You are ALWAYS in our thoughts, everyday.

we used to memorize in school. But those days are gone, just as most of the Americans who made this country what it once was. Time now for the young, to stand up on their hind legs, and seize the torch. There is no shortage of enemies, foreign and domestic.

…76th Field Artillery and a veteran of the AEF. Until he moved to Western Pennsylvania to marry my grandmother he’d been two places in his life, Richland County, Ohio and France. I have one of his letters home, published in his hometown Mansfield Times, his tin-pot helmet painted in the (nearly faded) harlequin colors celebrating the Armistice, a framed original of his unit’s Christmas Dinner menu (”Die Wacht am Rhein, Christmas 1918″), his field belt, and a hook-hilted French bayonet he brought home as a souvenir.

Old Ohio farm boy that he was, Papa Bill never forgave the Germans for the time his unit was forced to shoot their draught horses — there were no gas masks for them the first time his unit was hit with gas shells. He later gave a stepson to France (KIA in 1944) — never forgave the Germans for Sonny, either.

Our family has veterans from all the nation’s wars since, but Papa Bill was special. November 11 will always be Armistice Day for me.

around the 11th hour of this day that always saddens me (for various reasons-retired as a SFC a few years back etc). Went on Drudge report and saw an article that says the O is going to reject the current plans for Afghanistan and tell them to start over with new plans that include political stuff that should be settled AFTER winning the war…

Can/will no-one impeach this idiot for sheer incompetence? Biden, for all his gaffes and general feel of incompetence is looking better and better every day…