Laying the wreath

We had a short ceremony at the Jet Age Museum today to mark remembrance Sunday. Ken Plowman laid the wreath after the Last Post and 'They shall grow not old......'. We then had the silence followed by Reveille and the Kohima epitath "When you go home, tell them of us and say
For their tomorrow, we gave our today".
Ken was a Horsa glider pilot in 1945, a very dangerous but essential task to deliver large numbers of troops to the battlefield. There was no way the pilot was going to take off again so invariably joined the fighting troops. My father was about to start Horsa glider training (he was Blackwatch regiment) to go to the Far East to invade the Japanese occupied country of Burma. The second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki forcing the Japanese into surrender so he, luckily, did not get to carry out that task.

I do get emotional at such events, not that I was ever in conflict or saw anyone die on a battlefield, closest I got was 300km away from the Radfan when the rebels were shelling RAF Salalah, on the Southern coast of Oman. I was in Masirah receiving reports through the morse code circuit and watching the Hawker Hunters landing, refuelling, re-arming, taking off and coming back to do it all over and over again.