Wishing everybody a happy new Year!

Todd DePastino co-founded the Veterans Breakfast Club...

"Though their experiences are often distant, their memories can be vivid, and their storytelling seems to cause what novelist and World War II veteran Gore Vidal calls one of those "strange slips in time" when the present turns into "a past present where everyone is suddenly what they were and the dead live."

And perhaps, for those of us who never served and have not yet reached old age, that's what's most extraordinary about listening to the stories of those who are now in their 80s and 90s. What to me is the past is still their present. They live, in a sense, as strangers in our world, for their world, the one that shaped them, is gone, as are so many of the people whom they once knew and loved. This is why stories are so important, for through stories people can wake the dead, if only for a moment, while those of us who listen can touch the past and connect with those who are, quite literally, from another time."

linked from Tom Spurgeon's interview with Todd
Todd is the author of a biography of The great Bill Mauldin