[U S Army EOD]

No never read the book. Have no idea who would have called the game. But little quirks of fate make you wonder sometime what would have really happened.

And when you think of alternate history you wonder how much of the history that is written down is actual history and not an alternate interpretation of history because the writer didn't like the facts and decided to change a few events here and there.

In saying this, it is interesting how different the personnal accounts from what you read about from your relatives and the ones that I have seen differ from the offical history books.

[AnAmericanMother]

I think one problem with history as traditionally written is that historians for the last 50 years stopped looking to the "boots on the ground" - original source documents such as correspondence and public records - and began thinking in terms of ideology and "trends". The idea of individuals affecting history became passe', and economic and social "forces" supposedly drove history.

I disagree completely with that view. Individuals make history, not some impersonal force be it Marxist imperative or manifest destiny. The best way to figure out what's going on is to study the everyday records of ordinary people. It's like putting together a jigsaw puzzle - the largest and most interesting jigsaw puzzle in the world.