My namesake, Jack Lee.

This is a photo of my namesake, John Samuel Lee, AKA "Jack", who died in WW2, flying with the RAF. His Wellington bomber was shot down by two Focke-Wolfe fighter aircraft of the German Luftwaffe on October 31st 1942 during a daylight raid over Essen, bombing factories producing armaments for the Nazis. This blog is, in part, dedicated to the memory of him, too, even though I never knew him. Living up to his name has been difficult for me. The dead hero is a hard act to beat.

But going back to the matter of choosing our parents, I really believe that we choose our entire families, spiritually. And I believe, t0o, that what we face these days is something like a spiritual fight, whereas my uncle (he was my father's brother) died fighting a different kind of battle, although in some ways it was spiritual, too.

A friend of mine in Santa Fe, Steve, told me that his father, who'd been a fighter pilot in the Vietnam war, told him that "you don't win arguments from the seat of a fighter plane", and I think I saw something of that when I was a child.

Besides, what a waste of a life it was, that this lovely man died at the age of 23? He was, I understand, a keen violinist and artist. He had his whole life ahead of him, yet he was blown to pieces in a war.

As a child I could never understand the point of war. I figured that, were I to simply not fight, then chances were that someone "on the other side" would do likewise. I mean, how many men died in WW1, that would have been so much happier to just kick a ball around with each other?

In some respects, to fight is more cowardly than to not do so, I think. But there are those, I suppose, that see otherwise. I can see why they see otherwise, too. It isn't an easy question to answer. Choosing to fight, kill and die for whatever reasons isn't something one should take lightly, of course. I just found it peculiar that we talk of fighting for our country when it's technically killing. Fighting sounds so much more like fisticuffs, and not the brutal slaying, stabbing and bombing that it really is. If I saw TV ads for army recruitment where men were stabbing each other with bayonets, and shooting each other in the head, then I'd feel that our governments would be portraying a far more accurate statement of what would be expected of its people.

Instead, though, we give them nice uniforms and sparkly medals.

War is odd, though. I mean, these people go out and do all that killing and getting killed and maimed, then are expected to just blend back into society afterwards, as if nothing had happened, having seen such awful sights.

My father once told me about the scene of carnage after DDay, on the road to Paris. It was called the Falais gap, and he said that the stench of death was unbearable, with bodies of men and horses, bloated in the June sun. How utterly ghastly! How obscene, eh? How do you cope with seeing that kind of thing? I once witnessed the aftermath of a very serious car crash, and seeing someone badly injured and dying in front of me was enough. How do you live with being part of the force that inflicted such horror, even if you were one of the "good guys"?]

Life. It's a funny old game. People have described me as being oversensitive. Is it oversensitive to think that war is absolute insanity? Yet its been me with the mental problems, apparently...

Heigh ho!