We fired our guns and the Commies kept acomin'...

November, 1950, on the road to Chosin Reservoir, Marine Lieutenant James Stemple's Able Company holds a position against the Chinese Communists.* The Chicoms charge.

"We thought they were on drugs, the way they kept coming at us. I shot this one charging soldier four times in the chest and saw the white padding fly out the back of his jacket,  but he didn't drop until he had thrown his grenade. Our little carbine didn't have  nearly the stopping power of the M-1 rifle. A direct hit with an M-1 round would knock anybody on his ass.  Still,  four carbine rounds. Kept coming. "

Th  lieutenant might be a hard sell for the 5.56 crowd today. I know, the modern service round isn't to be compared to the  Mr. Pistol carbine ammunition, but some fellows' experience just makes it hard for them to buy into the zen of less as more.

Lunch time reading, so no link.  Russ, Martin.  Breakout, The  Chosin Reservoir Campaign, Penguin, New York, 1999. pp. 40-41.


___


*By this time even MacArthur's intelligence section was willing to admit the Chinese were in the war.

It isn't that you can't find a place to pee in Ireland. It's that the usual suspects suffer from wadded stepins  because they're short of officially designed, approved, and supervised  elimination stations along the new wrong-side highways.


My Celtic warrior ancestors spin in agony. "Wot's wrong," they cry from their martyr graves,  "with just pissing on the nearest Black and Tan?"


"

Jack Shelley of WHO

The TMR morbidity content is elevated this evening, but another man from the era  when broadcast journalism contained journalism has died.

Jack Shelly, 98, was a fixture on 50,000-watt WHO for decades.  In 1944 at Bastogne he interviewed Iowans in combat. A year later in the Pacific he was the first to record interviews with B-29 fliers returning from Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

It is stretching things only a little to say that for some 30 years, Iowa and much of the Midwest stopped whatever they were doing at 12;30 p.m. to listen to a deep, melodious voice reporting the news of the day and resisting every urge to report his opinion of the news.

It was a  lucky young reporter who had the privilege of knowing him.

Edwin Newman

Dead at 91, and we have lost a premier defender of the English language as a vehicle for the exchange of rational thought.

Or, as Wiki says, an old-school journalist with a "fierce belief that degrading the language was damaging the nation."

RIP.
.