Everyone should study military history – not just West Point and Annapolis cadets.

Understanding the past is the only way to understand the present, and to make calculated guesses about the future. With people like MarkG8 to guide us, we can start learning Chinese now, and beat the rush.

Having read Hanson’s piece it makes me wonder why he, a man who claims he was surrounded by relatives who rehashed their personal war stories all the time didn’t enlist himself. I too have relatives who served, a West Point graduate grandfather, an uncle who almost died in both the Battle of the Bulge and Tet, and my father who spent three years flying around the South Pacific as a flight engineer on a B-24 when he would have preferred to be at the University of Illinois on that football scholarship he earned. None of them regaled us with war stories as far as I remember. None of them “talked constantly about battle”. I had a hard time prying any of that personal history out of them. Recalling the time a friend’s bomber blew up on takeoff or the days when my uncle almost lost his toes to gangrene in the Ardennes weren’t pleasant for them. Watch almost any interviews with WW11 soldiers, no one who has been in combat glories in war. They tell sad tales of long dead friends who never got the chance to grow up or the last look on the faces of the enemy soldiers they killed. Faces they’ll never forget. It makes me wonder what kind of family Hanson was born into. Maybe
descendants of Viking berserkers or maybe just bullsh*t artists who think puffing up their chests in front of the kids is an important quality in a man. Maybe it explains why Hanson is the warlover he is. Too bad he never got firsthand experience. Really too bad.