At the office where I work, there are large TVs situated around the open bays and tuned to CNN (but muted, fortunately) so that most us us can see what's going on in the world. This is actually useful, professionally, since when a natural disaster occurs anywhere in the world, our customer networks are likely to be affected. Having hundreds of network nodes disappear over the course of a weekend is more easily explainable if you realize that there is, say, a hurricane coming onshore in Louisiana.

So the other night, we noted the news story of pirates thwarted off the coast of Somalia, and were talking about that part of the world. The subject of Black Hawk Down came up, and the conversation ultimately migrated to other books and films before we got on the topic of Hal Moore's and Joe Galloway's We were Soldiers Once...And Young. I and the Marine veteran in the office educated our coworkers a bit, and then the conversation moved along, but not before we touched on the story of Rick Rescorla on 9/11.

Almost serendipitously, then, Greyhawk of the Mudville Gazette today tells us that the 40th anniversary of the Battle of Ia Drang is coming up next week, with veterans of the battle gathering to remember their brothers in arms and the events that have earned them a place in the history books.

Boston Herald writer and editor Jules Crittenden wrote a remarkable article about a couple of the men who came through the battle, particularly about SGT John Eade. The entirety of said piece not fitting the space constraints of a newspaper, Mr. Crittenden has graciously allowed Greyhawk to publish the whole thing: I Am Going To Die Well.

Our troops then and now are not nameless automatons whose deaths and injuries are to be tallied as on a scoreboard. Each has a name, and each has a story. Thanks, Mr. Crittenden, for telling us more of those stories, lest we forget.

Posted by Russ at 03:53 PM, November 8, 2005 in Soldiers/Vets