Department of War - It Must be a Boomer Thing:

5 September 2025

Happy Friday!

Changing the U.S. Departmental title, Department of War, to Department of Defense — in 1949.

The Boomers were already having their nasty influence upon We The People.  But, let us be fair.  Their parents let them get away with all the misery and mayhem that so horribly haunts the Americans who followed in their wake.

And it was a big wake.

Me, I’m still waking up from that wake!

It has become too easy, and justified, to blame the Spoiled Brat Boomers for just about everything with which We the Patriots have had to contend.  The emotions run the gamut from resentment to outrage, and back.

I have chosen, just within the past few years, to unburden myself of the burden of annoyance toward this big demographic blob that still believes it Runs the Show.  I mean, just look at dissipated Slick Willy and his Defibrillator — at the airport?  Or was it the tarmac, his preferred meeting place for anyone, anytime, for anything.

Yes, Billy Boy was an indiscriminate Tarmac Troll. He really ought to consider hoisting that Big Bible in full view, like he did in 1997.  Or was it 1998?

I guess the cynically-tinged sarcasm will never fully leave me when it comes to those Clinton Years.

Before those years, I worked, for a piddly paycheck at the Sacramento District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.  I toiled at many tasks, so many they are hard to enumerate.  One of the jobs I worked myself out of, was unofficial Photo File Clerk in Civil Design Section A of Engineering Division.

The metal photo file boxes were stacked atop the metal filing cabinets (at which I also toiled to impose some sort of organization, preferably alpha-numeric).  The photos, in b&w but also in fading Kodak color, had been shoved into the visual memory vault, perhaps with the idea of being totally forgotten.

I, of course, had to rectify that problem!

It was a real education for me, that process of sorting through and arranging more than a decades’ worth of photographs from periodic inspections of dams and bridges in northern California.  The two sets of flood-control twins, Hidden and Buchan, and Success and Terminus, affectionately remain in my sentimental-technical memory!

Occasionally, I had to take a break from the photo-sort to wash my grimy fingers, but the effort was not without its tangible benefits.  Wedged among some of the photos was an envelope entitled WAR DEPARTMENT.

I pulled out the neglected piece of American history, and then I asked my supervisory engineer, a structural type, if anyone wanted that envelope.

This gentleman shrugged and said, “No.  You can have it.”

Now, this person was not a HippieBabyBoomer.  He was a War Baby.  He was but a small, but stable, part of that small, stable and select group of Americans born immediately before and during World War II.

That heroic “demographic” preceded their spoiled-brat brothers and sisters, the heirs to Saving the World in Their Own Image.  Those stalwart individuals played by the rules, obeyed the laws of God and society, got married, had families, voted their consciences (cause they truly HAD consciences), and watched their younger siblings trash everything they, and their parents, that Greatest Generation, had sacrificed to preserve, protect, and defend — to SAVE for future generations.

Those War Babies were heroes to me, and to many other Americans.  They weren’t perfect, and they knew it.  They knew their foibles, and they faced them with dignity.  The most humble and brave among them dealt head-on with their flaws, their sins, their failings in this very mortal life.  They might not have liked the truth, staring at them, but they worked to accept it — not hide it, or slick it, destroy it, defame it, mock it, lie about it, and create an entire Propaganda Media to cover their sorry rear-ends.

I always try to have something nice to say about everyone, and if I can’t say something nice, then I chose to not say anything.

When it comes to the rotten rear ends of that generation, I now know precisely what they are, so I chose to say nothing.  Except for the fact that this dreadful phenomenon did not take place only in the United States.

I knew, quite confidentially and lovingly, a Frenchwoman who suffered mightily as a child in wartime France.  Her father wasn’t Vichy, or Free French.  She was never very clear on his role during those Dark Years.  After the war, however, après la guerre, she knew his role in the future of la France because her mother gave birth to a son.

According to my French friend, “The sun rose and set on that son.  And it absolutely crushed me.”

Yes, it did.

Nothing that I could do or say altered in any significant way that damage to her soul.  Sorrowfully walking away from this woman, during the post-Cold War era, helped me to understood that the post-war era of any war encompasses many forgotten heroes, and many forgotten victims.

On this Friday, I am happy to honor those valiant souls, the warriors whom so many others willfully forgot.