💾 Archived View for tilde.club › ~winter › gemlog › 2023 › 11-11.gmi captured on 2024-05-26 at 14:52:38. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Given Russia's invasion of Ukraine last year, and the terror attacks by Hamas and subsequent response by Israel this year, I'm once again thinking how blessed I am to have never been touched by war. The closest it's been in my life is via my brother-in-law, a former infantry sergeant who served in Afghanistan. Other than that, it's taken the form of family stories from my father, because it was my grandfather's generation who fought Nazi Germany. My grandfather didn't actually fight himself, though he was in the army - he was a tank mechanic on the south coast of England, and fixed up the ones that made it back. But I have long-gone great uncles who experienced the hell of war: one who pulled his brother's body out of the water after a U-boat attack, and another who was tank crew, and fought Rommel's forces across Africa. His reward, as an experienced tanker, was to be part of the assault force on D-Day.
It's not lost on me that the worst parts of my life have been comparatively not that bad; that I've worked in the same field in a few different companies since I graduated university, that I've got a small family and a house and an extraordinary amount of love. And today I'm thinking not just about the people who will never have that, but the politicians and people in power who set the world on such awful courses. How they're never the ones at the end of the bayonet; how so often they get to die peacefully in their sleep.