Mark.
I was born. Three hundred and fifty-nine years after the Spanish Armada's worst losses. One hundred and forty-three years to the day after dyspeptic U.S. Navy Captain Edward Preble again thrust his seven-ship command into soup-warm Tripolitan waters, sinking three enemy gunboats with commanding weight of metal, capturing three more, making the Mediterranean somewhat safer for tourism.
My father told me his war stories, to pass the time. I loved them.
Born I was, a third of a century to the very day on which German belligerence ignited the Great War. The War to End All Wars, commentators wink, hoping for a free glass from dunce admirers.
Born a mere four years to the day, could still hear the echoes, after General George S. Patton, Jr., Olympic athlete, raised affluent, dyslexic yet highly accomplished, enraged at finding cases of psychological distress among the bleeding wounded, slapped and humiliated Private Charles Herman Kuhl at a Sicilian evac hospital. Patton sent Kuhl back to the front against doctor's orders, despite serious physical ailments. Patton thrust himself into the face of modern medicine and exploded with contempt. His superior, Eisenhower, after an attempted denial (no sale), demanded George apologize to the troops and win the public relations battle if he could. Patton died in a car crash in Germany, a few months after World War II ended, paralyzed from the neck down.
You see.
Me: three years to the day since the American breakout from Normandy captured the Mortain high ground, a blousy piedmont scuffmark on a map to Paris spread across a Jeep. The German counterattack in force failed despite Hitler's screaming. A lesson on the limits of lungpower. My father landed in the interval, intent on sightseeing if he got the chance.
Me again: born two years exactly from the glorious, much-anticipated-by-the-inventor day when the Kyushu J7W1 Shinden prototype first flew. Blue skies. Rising Suns. No avail. The radical, tail-first, rear-mounted-prop design, everything backwards, meant to attack unescorted B-29s at extremely high altitudes and save the Japanese homeland, showed potential. Authorities wrote a production order for 1,000 Shinden ("Magnificent Lightning"). Three days later Hiroshima met the atomic bomb. On August 8 the Soviet Union declared war on Japan, a signal that resistance was futile and the allies all knew it. Nagasaki was A-bombed on the 9th. On September 2 the unconditional surrender was signed. Japan loses. World War II is officially over.