Retrospective

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My Grandpa's War

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My Grandpa's War

Today marks the tenth anniversary since my grandpa died. He was 91, he had recently had major surgery and ended up going to hospice where he died peacefully. I was 3,000 miles away doing my PhD in Dublin, Ireland. Few people had as large an impact on me as he did. He taught me how to ride a bicycle but more than that he was just there for most of my childhood being himself. I have, unsurprisingly, been reflecting on him and his impact as this anniversary approached. When I was last in Virginia I found copies in my brother’s house of some memoirs he wrote in his final years, and I thought this would be a good time to share one: in this case, his memory of his time at war.

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Remembering Pearl Harbor

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Remembering Pearl Harbor

Before he passed away in 2014, my grandpa wrote down a few short pieces about some of his memories from the years 1941-51. These were written for a cousin of mine as a way to record and share some of his stories. For most of my life he had been relatively quiet about these topics, but as he passed through his 80s and into his 90s, he opened up a bit more about it. One thing that struck me, though, was how when remembering Pearl Harbor and the entry of America into WWII what stuck in his mind 60 years later was not FDR’s speech or the horror of an attack on America. It was what America did to its own people. The stories below reflect the specific circumstances of growing up in relatively diverse rural communities in central California, and how what happened there shaped his memory of December 1941.

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Revisiting Commands and Colors: Ancients by Richard Borg

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Revisiting Commands and Colors: Ancients by Richard Borg

I played a lot of Commands and Colors: Ancients in college - I convinced the board game society to buy the base game and its first two expansions and for my enthusiasm I was tasked with stickering all three boxes! Luckily I love putting stickers on wooden blocks, so I didn’t mind in the slightest. After I graduated, though, I didn’t play it nearly as much because I didn’t own my own copy and it was harder to borrow the society’s copy when I was no longer an undergraduate (as a post-grad I could be a member but I rarely had the time for hanging around that I used to).

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Battles of Westeros: a BattleLore Game, A Personal Retrospective

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Battles of Westeros: a BattleLore Game, A Personal Retrospective

When it was released Battles of Westeros came with the tagline “a BattleLore Game”, a subtitle that probably does not mean very much to many people, and I don’t think it particularly did at the time either, but which I think is a fascinating insight into its creation - and possibly it’s ultimate failure. BattleLore is a game designed by Richard Borg and was sort of a medieval history entry in his ongoing Command and Colorrs series of games. This was a series of fairly light wargames that combine dice, hexes, and either blocks or miniatures in a tactical level game about (usually) historical battles. Battles of Westeros represents an interesting off-shoot from the core series, but to fully explain why I think it is so interesting - and why despite that I no longer own a copy - we should consider the history of the series it came from in a little more detail.

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We the People by Mark Herman: A Personal Retrospective

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We the People by Mark Herman: A Personal Retrospective

It seems more than a little absurd given the trajectory my life has taken, but when I was twelve years old I was really struggling to find anything to enjoy about studying history. My teacher at the time was the tragically named Ms. Aufil, and while she wasn’t quite awful, she certainly wasn’t inspiring, and I was having a hard time studying Virginia colonial history for what must have been the fifth time. A quirk of the Charlottesville public school curriculum of the time was that we spent the first six years of school only studying the period from the settling of Jamestown to the American Civil War – otherwise known as the period in United States history when Virginia was Kind Of A Big Deal. I was nearly fourteen years old before I learned anything from the twentieth century in a classroom setting. It was during this difficult period in my childhood that Mark Herman’s seminal game We the People entered my life.