Military

On January 8, 2022, Aleksander Tarnawski turned 101 years old. 101 years prior he had entered the world kicking and screaming in Słocin in the Rzeszów poviat in Poland. Like most of the young males of his generation, Aleksander Tarnawski soon found himself swept up in the war.

In the winter of 2004 a joint US, Iraqi, and British operation kicked off in Iraq. Local forces called it Operation Al-Fajr. Allied troops titled it Operation Phantom Fury. The world came to know this simply epic scrap as the Second Battle of Fallujah.

Shooting those guns were veterans from the Vietnam War, Gulf War, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and military still serving in uniform.

Today’s crop of actors is, with few exceptions, a bunch of vapid amoral losers. Their standard of accomplishment is running about naked and flying on private jets to A-lister conferences while telling the rest of us what we should be sacrificing to battle climate change. By contrast, David Niven was a real-live warrior.

Recently, I have fallen in love with a classic and it’s one that might fit your needs as well. Don’t write me off immediately because the name of the boot is the Altama Leather Combat Boot, colloquially known to service members as the “All Leather”.

There are roughly 400,000 veterans and eligible dependents buried at Arlington National Cemetery. Major Larry Alan Thorne is the only former member of the Waffen SS to be found there.

The Germans gifted the world with the first examples of the assault rifle, optimized combat submarines, operational jet fighters, and surface-to-surface ballistic missiles. While German military innovations have shaped the world for seventy years, in no place has the Nazi martial mythos been more profoundly manifest than in their tanks. The German Panther and Tiger tanks struck fear in the hearts of Allied servicemen wherever they fought.

Ian Fleming conjured his fictional MI6 agent 007 based upon his personal experiences as a spy during WW2. The name James Bond was pirated from that of an obscure ornithologist of the day. Fleming wanted his secret agent to have a name that was both pedestrian and unremarkable.

Young ideologically naive men always make the best soldiers. WW2 stole life on an unprecedented scale. Major Gangl’s heroic sacrifice was swallowed up in the carnage.