"Christmas in the Trenches"

I found this on DU last year about this time.

I think it's a wonderful story/song...


www.beheard.onasoapbox.com

Peace and glad tidings!

wonder if it was me who posted it here then.

the message of jesus can be powerful and positve.

thanks! I've actually e-mailed it out as a Christmas card this year.

if it was me, i am very happy to have helped spread the importance of that event in history.

the only thing like it was an event in viet nam the day humans first walked on the moon.

http://www.treefort.org/~cbdoten/rvntanks/arvns.htm


Jeffry ScottThe Arizona Daily Star

"It got absolutely still," says Crosby McDowell, left as a
soldier with his transistor radio and below left today, who was
in combat in Vietnam when the moon landing came on the radio. M.
Scot Skinner The Arizona Daily StarThe moon landing on July 20,
1969, gave Americans a temporary escape from all manner of
depressing news. Just two days before the historic landing, Sen.
Ted Kennedy drove a car off a bridge on Massachusetts'
Chappaquiddick Island, and an aide, Mary Jo Kopechne, was found
dead in the submerged vehicle. Just the year before, Sen. Robert
F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. were assassinated.
Meanwhile, the nation was ripping itself apart over the bloody
conflict in Vietnam. But nothing could keep Americans from
feeling giddy, proud and optimistic as they gathered around
television sets that historic Sunday evening. Neil Armstrong and
Buzz Aldrin were about to leave footprints on the moon. The lunar
landing occurred on Monday morning in Vietnam, where Capt. Crosby
McDowell was with a battalion of South Vietnamese soldiers five
miles south of Da Nang. They had made contact with the enemy, a
North Vietnamese unit of undetermined size, and a dangerous
cat-and-mouse game was under way. "All of a sudden it got so
quiet,'' McDowell said. "It got absolutely still." Turns out that
everybody in the battalion was glued to their transistor radios,
listening to news from the moon. "I asked what the enemy was
doing, and I found out they were listening to the radio, too," he
said. It was surreal, said McDowell, who is now a financial
consultant in Tucson. "Usually the action doesn't stop once
contact is made," said McDowell, who said the war "stopped dead
in its tracks" as Armstrong opened the hatch and climbed out of
the lunar module. "It was an awesome experience, and the icing on
the cake was seeing the moon right over us," he said. In a letter
to the Star, McDowell wrote: "I felt that we all shared in that
event and were in wonder at what was happening. For about two
hours, there were no sounds of war, only the calm and collected
voices of Neil and Buzz as they went about their chores directly
above us some quarter of a million miles away. Then, as abruptly
as it stopped, the war started again. A single pop of a rifle and
the staccato answer of a weapon on full auto broke the silence."

"McDowell said he will be forever grateful to the astronauts and
NASA for giving him a "realization that we are all members of
mankind."

sounds a lot like what happened that christmas day in 1914.

This is all the proof that wars are not waged by the people but the governments of those people. We need to hear more of this story. There is just so much hope in it for everyone. I don't know how the soldiers could actually go back and then wage war against those they just met and celebrated with. It is proof that humankind can overcome the petty differences that cause us to fight. If men can come together on a cold Christmas eve during WW1, there is still hope that we can put the scurge of war behind us.

I have John McDermott's recording of "Christmas in the Trenches." I think Nan Hoffman, one of my favorite Western New York performers, has also recorded it.

One Christmas I played the McDermott CD again and again. The weekend after 9/11, I played his version of "The Green Fields of France," which also seems appropriate these days.

We need constant reminding that we send people off to senseless slaughter again and again. My father and grandfather were lucky enough to survive, respectively, World War II and World War I. Many, many civilians and service members aren't so lucky.