W.J. Astore Former Army Ranger Rory Fanning has a thoughtful article at TomDispatch.com on why young men should not join the Army to fight the war on terror in distant lands. Here’s an excerpt: Believe me, it [the Afghan War] was ugly. We were often enough targeting innocent people based on bad intelligence and…
W.J. and J.A. Astore My Dad, Julius Anthony Astore, was a child of the Great Depression. Born in 1917, he had to quit high school in 1933 to help support his family. In 1935 he joined the Civilian Conservation Corps, or CCC, working in forestry and as a firefighter in Oregon until he left in…
W.J. Astore In 1936, my dad was nineteen and serving in the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Great Depression, fighting forest fires in Oregon. Due to a dry summer, 1936 was an especially bad year for fires, and my dad fought a killer one at Bandon-by-the-Sea in Oregon. After a tough fall, he and his…
Very sad news coming out of Arizona: the loss of nineteen firefighters as they fought valiantly against wildfires started by lightning. My Dad fought forest fires in Oregon in the mid-1930s when he was in the Civilian Conservation Corps, or CCC. He once worked nearly 24 hours straight on a fire line to contain a…
The Contrary Perspective 