As some of you know I have been selected to serve on a provincial reconstruction team in Afghanistan. This was a pretty last minute assignment and I've been running around trying to get my orders completed figure out with Lisa wanted to do (she has decided to move back to Boise) am just getting ready to leave everything behind for the next 14 or so months. I am finding silver lining to this cloud, while I'm going to miss Carter's first birthday (just as it did Coryn's) and Christmas and who knows what else. I am currently dictating this post using the voice recognition software on my new laptop. While isn't perfect it does work pretty well. It's probably not faster than typing but the software is supposed to begin to recognize my voice the more I use it.
I have learned a little bit more about what I will be doing while I'm in Afghanistan and and where I will be doing it but it's pretty late right now so I think I'm going to bed now and will get a little more specific later.
So I don't know if you were aware of this or not but Senator Christopher Dodd's father was one of the chief prosecuting attorney at the Nuremberg Trials at the end of World War II. Thomas Dodd did not talk about his experiences with his children and they only found out what he had done by disobeying their parents and playing in the attic where his notes, exhibits, photos etc. were stored. After the deaths of their parents the Dodd's children found letters from their father to their mother, letters that he had written while he was away. He was in Europe for over a year and he wrote to his wife nearly every day. These letters have been compiled into a book entitled Letters From Nuremberg.
The first two (or four or something like that... I don't remember, I didn't actually read the book, I listened to it) chapters really turned me off the book and put me in a negative mindset for the rest of it. Two major things turned me off, first Sen. Dodd kept saying things like my dad did this, my dad did that. My dad was innovative in this way, or my dad came up with this. Listen, I understand that you're proud of your father, you followed in his footsteps to the Senate after all but you came off as a braggart. Then in the rest of the book he refereed to his father as "Dodd" instead of "my father." The second item that got under my skin was how partisan he made the opening chapters of the book. I really liked Hiroshima because it was such a non political presentation of the dropping of the first atomic bomb. In this book however, Sen Dodd spelled out why democrats are better than republicans and why everything FDR did was good but everything George W. bush does is bad. Many of his arguments seemed completely biased and off base.
The rest of the book was pretty hit and miss. There was a lot of great historical information presented from a firsthand point of view account, an account that had never really been told before. There was also a lot of very personal comments of longing for home, missing family, and longing for home. I was hoping for a history book but I just got a bunch of love letters.
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