David: My apologies - I made the classic mistake of assuming that your golfing aquaintances were all similar in age and background to yourself - and had undergone a change in their outlook at some point from being doves to hawks, as it were. I’m sorry I made such a silly assumption.
To clarify, my brother and I were travelling through the backwoods of Tennessee in 1980 and we filled up on gas in a very quiet 1 pump station - it was straight out of “Deliverance” believe me. Anyways, the old chap who served us picked up on our Australian accents and proceeded to tell us about serving on the USS Yorktown in the Battle of the Coral Sea. He said things like “We lost a lot of good men in that war… never again…”
And those were the sentiments I consistently picked up on - there was a sense amongst these old men that war is terrible, that war is something which scars you for life and that it should never be entered into lightly. That was my impression at any rate as a young man.
No problem. My cousin landed in North Africa, Sicily, Anzio and made his way up the boot of Italy. When the Korean War started he said something like - Tell them to get a bed ready for me at Leavenworth (US Military Prison) because I ain’t going.