ROSS MCCALL As JOSEPH LIEBGOTT BAND OF BROTHERS · Part One

god... I love that in the shot we see of sid waiting by the car to pick eugene up at the train station you can see him wiggling his fingers/flexing his hands in his pants pockets when he and eugene lock eyes for the first time in over a year... HE WAS NERVOUS... LIKE HE WAS PICKING UP THE POPULAR GIRL FOR PROM... I feel sick

The first time I saw Skip Muck’s grave at the Luxembourg American Cemetery and Memorial, I just stood there and felt numb. I was with Dick Winters and Carwood Lipton, on a trip led by Stephen Ambrose. It was 1991. No tears. In fact, there’s a photo of three of us old vets standing at his grave and we’re all looking resolute. Soldiers, you know, posing for a picture taken by a historian who admired the hell out of us. I returned there in 2004 and remembered how when Roe asked if I wanted to see Skip, I’d said no. And when Winters asked if I wanted a break, I’d said no. I realized that since those moments, I’d grieved for everybody I’d lost except for one man, the man whose death I’d tried for decades to run away from, the man whose loss had hit me harder than all the rest. How many times had I looked at that 1942 photo of all of us at Toccoa, the one I’d written all the KIAs and SWAs on for those killed and seriously wounded, and thought, Why not me? Why no initials on my chest? Why not at Brécourt Manor, when I’d stupidly gone after what I thought was a Luger on that dead soldier? Or at Hell’s Corner, when German soldiers had our patrol outnumbered eight to three but wrongly assumed we had more firepower and surrendered to us? Or at Bastogne? If Winters hadn’t split Skip and me up, that would probably have been me, not Penkala, in that foxhole with Skip on January 9, 1944. But even if I’ve played the what-if game often, I know, deep down, that you can never win at it. Better to remember that, for whatever reason—God or fate or reading a Reader’s Digest article about paratroopers on a Greyhound bus heading for Astoria—I was privileged to serve with a company of men who would make me far more than I would have been without them. And that losing one of those men had hurt so badly that I’d buried the thought of him, thinking that somehow that would help me avoid the pain. Better, I’ve since learned, to turn into those waves and dive. So on that day in 2004 when I visited the cemetery where Skip is buried, I looked at that white marble cross and that name—Sgt. Warren H. Muck—and thought of the kid who swam the Niagara. The march to Atlanta. The smile. I knelt, placed flowers at the base of that cross. Prayed. All the things I’d done before when I’d come to see his grave. Only this time I did something different, long overdue, and hard but freeing. I cried sixty years’ worth of tears.

~ Don Malarkey

Stamps printed in Oman dedicated to cats

I wish I was in possession of a beautifully handsome girl boyfriend with princelike charms but I actually don't really want to be seen by anyone yet or talk to anyone or spend time with anyone and I won't be ready for our first kiss until 2 years have passed due to my shy disposition and I'm ugly and you'll probably grow jealous of the psychic powers I possess anyway so why do I even bother I don't know *kicks a rock and misses so my foot just swings in the air stupidly*

he was such a businessman here, sometimes i forget that they are big figures in their company now and the ones who have employes 205 days before yoongi is back

he is love

Unknown photographer, Texas, 1943

An assortment of bags dating from the 1400s to 1900s

Vivienne Westwood: Heart Leather Gloves (2008)