I am out wandering the wild for a month, but am in town. I wanted to post links to excellent pieces about History Flight’s amazing work in recovering Alexander Bonnyman Jr. here while I have a few minutes online.
We are most grateful for all the excellent work by journalists on this story.
Looking forward to speaking with Colorado Public Radio, Radio New Zealand and more, soon.
I enjoyed your interview on Colorado Matters, and I thought you may be interested in a book I read recently by Ishmail Kadare called “The General of the Dead Army.’ It is a novel set in Albania in the 1960s. An Italian general is sent to locate, disinter, identify, and repatriate the remains of his country’s soldiers killed in WWII.
I posted an article about the newly discovered remains of Marines killed on Tarawa ( including your Grandfather) on my site http://www.battlebook.com.
I also was impressed with your article on “…troops as heroes”
My Grandfather came to America from Italy at the turn of the century (19th) and earned his way out of poverty laying pipe in Philadelphia. With money in his pocket he returned to Italy in 1914 ( bad timing, I guess) to visit his mother – gets conscripted into the army and fights ( at 10,000 feet) in the Dolomites (aka Hemmingway’s “Farewell to Arms”) only to have his Machine gun company over run by the Germans. He is captured and spends three years in a prison of war camp. I don’t think he felt like much of a hero.
His son, (my dad) graduated from a land grant college which required ROTC training in the 1950s. He joined the Air Force ( and was always ready to get out) when at 36 and with three kids, he got orders to crew C-130s all over Vietnam (after freezing his ass off in a missile silo in North Dakota) He most certainly wasn’t treated like a hero.
And I enlisted in the Marines for a four year tour, and when I was done, I know I Wasn’t a hero.
Thank you, sir, for posting on my blog. I greatly appreciate your kind words.
Some of those ideas will be a thread through my upcoming book about my grandfather’s story.
Clay