War/Tear Jerker: Difference between revisions

* Two instances from the Battle of Mogadishu: One, the stories of Randy Shugart and Gary Gordon. For those who don't know, they were the two Delta force snipers that were put onto the ground to protect the crew of the Super-64, the second Black Hawk to crash in the city. They asked to be put in three times before permission was granted for them to go in, because command thought it was too dangerous. These men knew that. They knew a large armed force of Somalis was moving towards the crash site. They knew that it would only be the two of them against hundreds of heavily armed, very angry enemy combatants. They knew that there was little to no chance of coming out of that site alive. They also knew that there were American soldiers down there, their brothers in arms, and that if they didn't go get them, nobody would. So they went, they fought, and they died, and saved the life of [[CW 3]] Mike Durant. They were the only Soldiers to receive the Medal of Honor for actions in Somalia.<br />Two: After the capture of Mike Durant, American helicopters circled the city with loud-speakers, broadcasting "Mike Durant, we will not leave you." Poignant in the movie, gut-wrenching when you remember that this actually happened. The dedication that these men had to each other inspires Soldiers everywhere.

* This troper was taken on a visit to the very bunker where the Battle of Britain had been organized even as it was going on and preserved more or less as it would have been at the time, complete with radios to keep in touch with the various pilots. We were then told that the girls manning the radios were often able to hear the German pilots as well, and inevitably were privy to their last moments. THEN we were told how one girl once reported a German plane shot down, and as the plane was falling from the air she could hear its young pilot, screaming for his mother.

* The German scientist Fritz Haber was forced to leave Germany or face persecution from the Nazis because of his Judaism. The Nazis killed members of Haber's own family in Auschwitz using Haber's most famous creation: Zyklon B, which he had synthesized to be used as an insecticide.

** Would that be the same Fritz Haber who is often considered the father of chemical warfare and who, in World War I, as a captain in the German army, personally oversaw the deployment of chlorine gas at the Second Battle of Ypres, at which over 6,000 allied troops died due to gas inhalation ''within the first fifteen minutes''? Not the best example of a tearjerker you could have picked. One does not excuse the other.