Bruce Newman and his wife Lynn are old friends. Bruce was our financial guide for years and he finally was able to tear himself away from the roily-boily world of the Market when he was 75.
Back in 2015, he and Lynn flew to Paris and then went to Normandy's beaches to pay their respects to the dead. He e'd me about it and gave me permission to print the following:
"I am one of those veterans who is in the strange position of having been on active duty during the Cold War. We were in the Western Pacific for eight months while Nixon and Kennedy were debating the defensibility of Quemoy and Matsu Islands. We were doing joint exercises with the National Chinese Navy in that area (scary!)
I finished my sea duty and was assigned to a Marine-Navy-Army joint command in Coronado, CA, and got to go back to Okinawa for a teaching gig.
Then Berlin happened and I was extended four more months after my four months of Officer Candidate School (OCS) for a total of 36 months active duty. I stayed in the Reserves until '65. Did a reserve cruise on a destroyer escort (talk about scary!)
Anyway, the bottom line is that Cold War Vets do not even have a ribbon for that duty and Congress keeps rejecting efforts to present that to vets. On the other hand, I was lucky that no one was shooting at me.
Without seeming falsely modest, there were a hell of a lot of other guys doing the same thing.
And a couple of historic sites which stand out in my memory are a reminder of how lucky I was to have been born in 1936.
I saw the USS Arizona before the monument went up.
On a beautiful afternoon in Pearl Harbor in the Fall of 1959, I stood at attention with our crew and saluted as we went by the sunken ship. I still get goose bumps every time I tell that story. And seeing the destroyed bunkers and cemetery at Normandy defies description. It is impossible to imagine the chaos of those events."
Today's chaos is the spoiled, wealthy sports pros kneeling to protest their harsh treatment.
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