I wonder sometimes if the WWI vets felt gypped out because all we talk about is WWII. Dad says it's because all that's left are the latter, but growing up there were still doughboys running around and I still didn't remember ever discussing WWI. Hell, I didn't even know what it was about until I studied it in high school. I know why one is more popular: You've got big names like Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Truman, Churchill, and Yamamoto. You've got big events like the Final Solution, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Blitzkrieg, Pearl Harbor, and D-Day. It's easy to make a movie out of that.

But it's not like WWI didn't have its own memorable moments. The Ottoman Empire fell after a 400-year run, the Paris Peace Conference changed the fate of Europe and the Middle East to this day, the ethnic cleansing of the Armenians, and the bombing of the Lusitania. I also know it was the end of the 19th-century style warfare and strategy and the entry into the modern era with trenches, gassing, and submarines. Admittedly though, I can't think of a single military commander in that war and the only civilian leaders coming to mind are Wilson and Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose death was the immediate cause of everything.

Maybe because Hollywood hadn't latched onto it in the same way because there wasn't such a clear-cut "good" and "bad" side, nor was the United States' influence that great; hell, we didn't even join the League of Nations that Wilson himself proposed! The UK and France basically steamrolled their desires through and partitioned the Middle East between them while Wilson stood at the sidelines, desperately saying the Middle East should rule on its own.

But that doesn't mean those vets' suffering wasn't any lesser. They went though a lot of the same shit as the guys in WWII, but they weren't call The Greatest Generation. They don't get a new documentary every month. They don't have a whole channel dedicated to them. I wouldn't say they went into the dustbin of history, but they sure as hell didn't get as much honor and respect as the people fifteen years later.

Maybe the people serving in Afghanistan thought the same shit while the Iraq War was going on.

Remember that huge blackout that took out the entire northeast and parts of Canada? The tenth anniversary for that was yesterday. Jesus Christ.