of selfies and peleliu

I'm so guilty of NOT doing steps 1-4.

This blog has been replete with selfies lately.
Selfies with the guys, selfies in the pool, selfies in my bathroom.
Half the selfies are of me half-naked. Awkward.
I'm going to have to curb that.

Last night after work I spent the evening burning incense, drinking beer, and playing World War Two video games. This is where my dorkiness knows no bounds. First I read a chapter in my book The Pacific on the American invasion of Japanese-held Peleliu Island. It wasn't much more than a strip of coral filled with sand, marshes, and palm trees; but the Japanese knew how to entrench, and they knew how to fight. The warfare in the Pacific makes Normandy look like a game of hopscotch; but we love saving France so much, you'd think the Pacific was a sideshow. In reality, the Pacific was the main theater, and the war against the Japanese lasted far longer than the American war against Germany. But I digress ("Thank God," you say, if you had the diligence not to skim). After reading about the Battle of Peleliu, I put in my Call of Duty: World at War video game and play the first mission set on Peleliu Island, and I play it on veteran so I can't just run around with a flamethrower torching everybody. I want it to be hard, frustratingly hard. Once I beat that mission, I take to the skies, and I sit in the seat of a TBF Avenger and, flanked by F4U Corsairs, drop bombs on artillery positions on the Wake Island map (it's the closest thing Birds of Steel has to Peleliu). Having completed that, I play another mission "on the ground" in World at War, and then I switch back to Birds of Steel to tango with some Japanese Zeroes over the coral atoll. This goes on for about an hour, and it excites me to the core.

World War Two is one of the most fascinating wars. The interconnectedness between it, the First World War, the Cold War, and the wars against Communism in Asia is an interesting tale. Just to think that an assassination in Austria led not only to the world's first world war, but also to all those other things (and vaulted the United States from a dinghy, isolationist position in the western hemisphere to being THE world superpower)... Well, that's just interesting. World War Two is a gut-wrenching, horrifying, and enthralling story replete with all the great attributes of a great mythos. Yes, I enjoy studying colonial wars more than the Second World War; but insofar as "reading for fun" goes, World War Two is at the top of the charts. 

What first drew me in fascination to the Second World War was a love for aviation, and the airplane fighters captivated me as a child. Giants hunks of gas-guzzling steel and propellers cutting across the sky, thousands of feet above the war-torn ground, battling it out and dropping bombs and basically committing murder (as one Frenchman put it, "Fighter pilots don't kill; they murder."). What's my favorite WW2 fighter plane? you ask (Wait, no one asked that; they know better; but this is my blog, and there's a picture, so don't be too put off). The answer: The Grumman F4F Wildcat!

How is that tub-bucket not stalling?!

Want to read a good story about the Wildcat? Research the Battle of Midway and see the hell of a fight those American pilots made against the Japanese. Seriously, do it.