An interesting blog.

I'm not talking about mine. After stubbling upon this video I read his blog. Very long, very interesting. I couldn't ever read the whole thing but there were two interesting passages:

For my flight out, I sat next to an 83-year-old veteran from Eastern Washington who served in Tokyo at the end of WWII. He was assigned to guard the German embassy until its occupants could be shipped back to Germany. He'd come over from Europe where he served in the infantry, crossing through France into Dusseldorf and then sieging a small town near the border with Czechoslovakia.

His unit spent most of the war lost. Everyone was lost all the time, he said. The Germans removed all the signs and the maps were inaccurate, so they just wandered around hoping to stay alive. The town they attacked -- they completely missed where they were ordered to go. They only found it by accident, approaching from the rear at night, inadvertantly bypassing all the German defenses and taking the town without firing a shot.

and:
I had dinner tonight with two Sudanese priests. They’re here getting trained to deal with trauma victims in their country – which I am sure there is no shortage of. We had a fascinating conversation in which they explained the history of the Sudanese conflict. They had very thick accents and I could only understand about half of what they said, but it was a lot more than I knew before.

The thing that surprised me most was learning how pleased they are with the war in Iraq. It turns out the Iraqi government had been supporting the Arab leadership in Khartoum, providing weapons and money for their war against the Christians in the south. With Iraq crippled, the Sudanese government has lost their supplier and are suddenly scrambling. According to these priests, the current peace negotiations are the direct result of the Iraq war. Otherwise the Arabs wouldn’t even be at the table.


http://wherethehellismatt.typepad.com/blog/