And then I wrote...

by Dick Schilling, Editor Emeritus

... that sometimes, coincidences seem so ironic as to almost not be coincidental.
During the same period of a couple of days during which NBC anchor Brian Williams said he was experiencing some confusion about whether or not the helicopter in which he was a passenger in Iraq ten years ago was hit by an RPG or not, I was finishing a book about a woman who was not at all confused about an RPG striking the helicopter which she was flying in the same area.
The book is fiction, as apparently is Williams’ account.
The heroine of the book lost a leg. Williams lost credibility.
The lie by a network news “anchor” is not the first in recent history. Anchor Dan Rather was done-in by lies a few years back.
I suspect the title networks give their lead news announcer has a lot to do with their desiring to be celebrities more than newsmen. Some countries call them news “readers” which would seem to be more in line with what viewers should expect. A journalism school prof once told those of us in his class that if a reporter became part of the story, somewhere along the line he or she had made a professional error.
I bought the book because the story line intrigued me. It’s about an already pretty much dysfunctional family in which the mother is also an Air National Guard warrant officer and pilot. Her unit is deployed to Iraq. When she returns with PTSD as well as a missing limb, the family undergoes a metamorphosis of epic proportions.
I had known many instances during WWII in which a husband had gone overseas, leaving a wife to cope with the family on the home front. I can’t recall a case where those roles were reversed. I thought about that when I first read about Joni Ernst. (Aside for the benefit of any millennials, those ages 18-34, who might be reading this, and I suspect they are few, Ernst is now a senator from Iowa. A recent study showed 36% of you could not name a senator from your state.) Ernst is a National Guard officer who also was deployed to the Middle East, leaving a family back home in Iowa.
The book is Home Front, by Kristin Hannah, published by St. Martin’s Press, and copyrighted in 2012.
Still on the subject of the battle against radical Islam in the Middle East and around the world, I was struck by President Obama’s comparison of that war, which he doesn’t recognize as such, with the Christian (read Catholic) Crusades of ten centuries ago. I have admitted here before that I did not pay as much attention to history as I should have, but I was under the impression that the original Crusades took place for the very same reason we are fighting Islam today, that is, to keep the Muslims from imposing that religion on the known world of the time.
Am I wrong?