There are few things that I really look forward to in life more than a new year. The New Year brings with it a sense of peace and joy, a resolution to create a better life for my family, and the promise of a fresh start in the new year. I have been thinking about what it means to be a patriot since I was a kid, and it has always been one of my most favorite holidays.
Patriot’s Day is on January 20th, and it’s the day I was born, but it has a special place in my heart because it was the day the US, Australia, and Canada declared war on the Axis powers in World War II, and all three countries united to fight the Nazis. It was also the day I began my military career, and I remember it with great fondness.
The day after Pearl Harbor I joined my first military unit, the 24th Infantry. At the time, I thought I was joining a bunch of other kids who were just going to be sent to fight in a war. I was in the infantry but I was also a quartermaster, so I knew all about the logistics of war.
Like all good military stories, the 24th Infantry was complicated, but not in a bad way. I had been assigned to the 4th Infantry Division. My job was to man a mortar platoon, which was a regiment of guys firing mortars at targets. In my mind I was probably more of a rifleman than anything else, and I was going to spend most of my time on the rifle range with my platoon.
My mortar platoon wasn’t the best platoon in the regiment. They were about the worst. The guys were a bit too aggressive, and because of this the platoon was referred to as “The Hard Luck Platoon.” I always thought that they were just going to fight everyone else in the platoon, and that in the heat of battle they wouldn’t get killed. I was wrong.
The guys in my platoon were about as hard-luck as you can get. Like I said, one of them was named “Harisburg”, and he was the only one who could shoot a.50 caliber rifle. He was a good shot, but he was also a good liar. He would tell me he had just killed a man, but that was just a ruse for me to try to get him killed. It worked every time.
I’m sure I’m not the first person to have heard of Harisburg. Even though he was the only one of the guys who could shoot a rifle, the rest of the guys in the platoon were afraid of him. He was the one who would make you think that you were about to get killed. He would tell you that he was going to kill you. He would tell you that you were going to die.
Harisburg always said that he was going to kill you. He was always going to kill you. Even when he told me he was going to kill me, he told me that he was going to kill me. He told me that he was going to kill me every single day. He told me he was going to kill me. He told me that he was going to kill me.
The harrisburg pa patriot blog has posted obituaries for about a dozen people who died in the line of duty. The most recent one is for the 4th of July, but it’s not the blog’s first. If you’re a military family, you can check out the other posts to see what’s been posted.