Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Oh, an ammo clip

From the "Remove bullets from pockets" Laundromat Archives, German version.

You haven't lived in the real U.S. until you've done your laundry in a neighborhood where the sign "Remove bullets from pockets" is prominently displayed above the sign "Check dryer for lint before starting dryer".
That laundromat has to be in a big city, though, not in Caspar, Wyoming, or O'Neill, Nebraska.

One nasty thing about protracted armed conflict (formerly called war) is that the official end isn't really the end of it.

If you have not been living under a rock, you know that the people of London, Laos, Lebanon, Liberia, Libya, and lots of other places, not just those starting with L, frequently encounter wartime leftovers.

If you own an old house in a country that has seen war in the last hundred years, your odds of an encounter become more likely.

If that house has an attic not visited by humans in, say fifty years, even better.

When the crane and a large crew of workers arrived at the house to tear down the old roof, the foreman asked this question:  What should be do with anything we find in the attic?

Just dump everything. Keep whatever you want to keep, throw out the rest.

The speed with which a structure built laboriously over months came apart was dazzling. By noon, the whole superstructure was gone.

By the end of the day, everything had been broken down and dumped into the sorting containers on the two trucks on the street.

The foreman told you they were done and held up an object you recognized from a previous life:
Do you want this, we have a couple more? he asked.

You smiled, and responded, I don't have any use for an M1 Garand clip, can you turn that in to the authorities?

I will, sure, he said, wished you a good evening and left.

The neighbors knew the story. The local Uber-Nazi had organized a last stand in early 1945.

And how did that go?

By the time the Allies arrived here, they were doing shelling and bombing strictly during office hours. Eight in the morning to five in the evening, I kid you not. All houses on this side of the street, except yours, were left in ruins. Yours had an incendiary shell stick out of a wall, it failed to detonate. When that happens to a church, they call it divine intervention. In the case of the house, they called it dumb luck. Then some incoming GIs camped in the attic for a while.

It could have been worse.

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