Well... Yes!
I once gave a lift to a young German about my age who was trying to reach 'Mont-pel-ee-ay,' Vermont. First thing, I had to tell him that it was 'Mont-peel-ee-err' he wanted to ask for, and then we got to chatting. Of course 'ze warr' came up, when he ended up telling me that his mum had told him that, during the war, we Americans would drop 'poisoned sweeties' for unsuspecting German children to pick up and eat.
What was I going to say to that? 'Umm, I think your mum was telling porkies there!' probably wouldn't have done much for international friendship, so that I just said that this was news to me, that there was a famous pilot who would drop perfectly good 'sweeties' during the Berlin Airlift, the so-called 'Candy Bomber,' Gail Halvorsen, but that was about it as far as I knew.
I suppose this was the best Mum could do for her little boy, trying to put we Yanks on the same level as the Nazis, as if to say that we were all about the same when it came to doing bad things. Same here, I guess, when a Stuka strafes some kids in the UK and a P-47 strafes a girl in Germany. Is there a deeper meaning in that? Perhaps only that war is just not such a safe activity, which really does seem obvious. It can be fun, sure, blowing up some deserving s.o.b., or else all this gun camera film wouldn't be floating around on the internet, but it's certainly not safe.
If this Straits of Hormuz business does get going then I expect we will get hours of 15- or 30-second clips of some speedboat getting blown out of the water, showing our high-tech weaponry at its best. That should give the video gamers a thrill!
Last edited by chuks; 9th Jul 2012 at 12:44.