Alastair Mayer’s T-Space Blog

[I originally posted the following in response to comments by Howard Tayler and others on Howard’s Shlock Mercenary blog. I’ve made a few minor changes here.]

Happy US Veterans Day. I have great respect for US veterans — my father-in-law numbers among them, and US forces helped save Britain during WW II — but I’d like to gently point out that this is also Remembrance Day in Canada and Britain (and indeed all of the Commonwealth; in France it is celebrated as Armistice Day). So if you’ll forgive me, a few personal remembrances:

My mother’s father suffered lasting effects from being gassed in a trench in WW I; by that war my father’s father had already served with the British Army in the Sudan and South Africa, and was in Home Guard during WW II. One of my mother’s brothers was a commando during WW II, another spent most of that war in a Japanese POW camp in Burma. (You’ve seen/read “Bridge on the River Kwai”? He worked on that railroad, not the bridge.)

My Dad was “drafted” to work on radar and countermeasures during that war; sadly I didn’t learn much about what he did until after he died, some of it wasn’t declassified until the 1990s. I know he was on a mission that involved him and a pilot, in a small plane, flying toward the continent with radar-spoofing gear making them look like a fleet of bombers, with the expected (and hoped for) Luftwaffe reaction. (Idea being to get the Luftwaffe alert planes to scramble and burn fuel, so they’d be on the ground refueling when the real bomber fleet flew over.)

I spent a few years in the Canadian Forces Reserves, and spent much of my duty time deep in a NORAD bunker minding teletype machines — pretty safe. Some of my fellow reservists volunteered to serve with regular forces assigned to UN peacekeeping duty in the middle east. Fortunately, all my buddies came back.

I’ve had the privilege to be born, raised, and live in free countries (England, Canada, and the United States, respectively.) To all those of freedom-loving nations who have served in defense of that freedom, thank you.