Top Tweets for #Endfacism

(TL;DR) Here's the thing about WW2. It called up millions of ordinary American men who were shoved into the IET pipeline—Initial Entry Training, aka: "Boot Camp," followed by specific jobs skills training—then spat out the other end as infantrymen, signalmen, artillerymen, adjutants, mechanics, truck drivers, tankers, et al. And when it was all done? Most of them went back to civilian life. Their service (those who survived) ended when the war was over. These were not professional soldiers. They were normies made to perform soldiering for a specific war, and only when the war was done did they exit the soldiering life. And went back to being normies again. But the soldiering life gave them a shared experience they would keep with them. It provided a common nomenclature and emotional framework that could be referenced in an instant. Any setting or situation. Sometimes just even by guys looking at each other. They could tell. (break whistle, guys sitting down to open lunch buckets) "You in North Africa?" "Naw, Bougainville. What about him over there?" "Jumped from a Gooney Bird over France." "I heard that was rough." "Not as rough as The Bulge." And so on, and so forth. It was for many of them *the* singular touchstone of their lives. And it cut across economics, class, status, even ethnic barriers. A language of shared suffering, shared boredom, shared laughs, shared effort, sometimes shared terror, also sometimes tears, and ultimately formed a common-denominator vibrational bedrock which echoed through the decades. Influencing both families, and communities.