You Can't Have Her

You all know by now that my nephew is stationed at Fort Hood and was there at the time of the shooting when the fort was put in lockdown. Yesterday there was a shooting a couple miles from my house and my niece's two children's school was put into lockout. I never knew the difference between lockdown and lockout until yesterday. In a lockdown soldiers stay where they are, students stay in their classroom. No unsupervised movement is allowed. In a lockout nobody is allowed into the fort or school but movement is allowed within the structure involved. One of the weird things about yesterday's shooting is Mom and I were thinking about going to lunch at a Wendy's that isn't all that far from the shooting. The way we drive to Wendy's would have placed us right in the middle of the intersection where the shooting happened and at the time it happened. However, right before lunch I became a little ill and we decided to stay home Coincidence? You can read about the shooting here:

http://www.oregonlive.com/tualatin/index.ssf/2009/11/police_responding_to_tualatin_shooting.html

http://www.oregonlive.com/news/index.ssf/2009/11/robert_and_teresa_beiser_were.html

Two people were killed and two people were wounded. According to news reports there would have been more victims had the employees of the drug testing lab where the shooting took place not immediately took preventative actions. The two dead are husband and wife. The husband killed the wife that had filed for divorce two weeks earlier and then killed himself. According to the second article above the divorce was amicable and the two were amazing parents to the two children that are now left parentless. As so often happens in these shooting there was a warning sign that didn't really cause red flags until after the shooting. The husband just weeks earlier had purchased several guns.

A couple of really troubling statistics are in the first article above. Did you know that the second leading cause of death among women "at work" is homicide? Nearly one in four women experience domestic violence in their life. At least twenty-four percent of abused women say that the abuse had forced them to be late for work or to miss it completely.

I've never understood the mentality of "if I can't have her nobody can." Maybe the lack of understanding is because I really haven't had that many girl friends in my life. I'm thinking maybe four. Twice it ended because of them, twice it ended because of me. In each case I always wanted the best for them and they for me. In all but one case there was a connection a year or two later just to check and see how the other was doing. Isn't that they way is should be? The time that I was the most hurt was when one of the ones that I chose to leave said to me "I know now that I will never be with the man I love." I was absolutely crushed that I could hurt someone that much. A couple of years later when she asked for access to one of my online profiles I learned that she was back with her first husband and happy. That lessened the hurt quite a bit. I was never worried, however, that she was going to take a gun to me and certainly none of the other exes never had to worry about me going off the deep end of the ocean and firing on them and innocent bystanders.

What do you think is the main reason that some people can wish for the best for the other in failed relationships and others want to prevent their former love from happiness and maybe even living? The way they were raised? How they were taught to think about women? When we were raised we never were taught gender differences. The men in our family cooked and the women mowed lawns. What decided who did the task was when the task needed doing and who had the time to do it. We are always taught to respect not only our elders but others. Men in the family were taught to respect women and the women in the family were taught to respect men. I sure hope we can figure out the cause of domestic violence before some jilted lover agian goes off the deep end and kills someone.

TODAY'S WHO AM I?

Yesterday's answer: Maurine Neuberger.

Today's on Veteran's Day we honor a Veteran with the Who Am I?

I was born in Texas in 1920 and died in a plane crash in 1971. I tried to enlist in the Army during World War II but was rejected as being to young at age 15. One year later my sister adjusted my birth records to show me as being eighteen. The army then accepted me. In twenty-seven months of combat I went on to win the Medal of Honor, Distinguished Service Cross, Silver Start, Legion og Merit, Bronze Star with oak leaf cluster and Valor device, and the Purple Heart with two oak leaf clusters. My grave in Arlington Cemetery is the second most visited grave after JFK's. I won over thirty-two medals including five from France and one from Belgium. My parents were poor sharecroppers, I was the sixth of twelve children, nine of whom survived until the age of eighteen. My mother died when I was fifteen and I dropped out of school in the eighth grade to help support my family. I was forced to place my three youngest siblings in an orphanage to ensure their care and I reclaimed them after World War II. I joined the United States Army after being turned down by the Marines and the paratroopers for being too short (5 feet 5.5 inches (166.4 cm)) and the Navy for being slight of build. My company commander tried to have me transferred to a cook and bakers' school because of my baby-faced youthfulness but I insisted on becoming a combat soldier. I took part in the invasion of Sicily after which I was promoted to corporal. There I contracted maylaria which put me in the hospital several times during my Army career. After the war I suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. I was plagued by insomnia, bouts of depression, and nightmares related to my numerous battles. Always an advocate of the needs of America's military veterans, I eventually broke the taboo about publicly discussing war-related mental conditions. In an effort to draw attention to the problems of returning Korean and Vietnam War veterans, I spoke out candidly about my own problems with PTSD, known then and during World War II as "battle fatigue" and also commonly known by the World War I term "shell shock." A person I served with during the war once commented about my grave marker: "Like the man, the headstone is too small." I was married in 1949 but divorced in 1951. I then married an army nurse that I had two sons with. After leaving the army I became a little fairly well known country singer/writere and also went into an occupation that despite my army heroics is the occupation that the readers here would most know me for. I can honestly say I went to Hell and Back. Who Am I?