Movies and Books

United 93

We saw the movie “United 93” the other evening. Every American should see it. It should be shown in schools. I think people need to see that film. They need to put a face to jihadists. To the crazy people who are trying to [alternately] rule or destroy the world.

I had an interesting physical response to the movie. Of course, like everyone else, I knew how the story ended. I knew what happened on the plane. But from the minute the film began, my palms were sweaty, my heart raced and I found myself holding my breath at various points in the movie. Tears filled my eyes when the planes hit the WTC and I felt like I did that day in Manhattan waiting for the next plane to hit... the next shoe to drop. I thought, man, if I feel like this early in the film, how the heck am I going to endure the latter scenes that had been described as intense and overwhelming? With my hand firmly wrapped around the hubby's arm and a few deep breaths, I got through it.

If you have hesitated to see the film, I urge you to see it. It is riveting and well done. Yes, it is emotional and intense, but only in its unflinching portrayal of the things that went wrong... and the things that went right. I hope that we have now gotten it all right. As I told my husband, it will never happen again. I don’t think Americans will ever stand for it. If they think they might, then they need to see this movie.

As an aside, after I saw this story, I’m pretty sure I’m right about Americans never letting it happen again…

Go see “United 93”.

One Drop of Blood, by Thomas Holland

Someone was nice enough to send me a copy of this book. I had mentioned in a blog post or two that I'm a fan of a number of authors that write forensic/coroner type mystery novels.

Holland is the scientific director of the DoD Central Identification Laboratory. CIL is responsible for, among other things, identifying all US war dead from the battlefields old and new around the world. It's a good first effort at drawing the reader into the world of such a daunting task as he tells the mystery of one set of remains from Vietnam and the Arkansas family of the lost soldier. In the process of making my way through this story, I now have a much better understanding of the classification and identification of mitochondrial DNA than I thought possible.

I hope Mr. Holland's next book is the real-life story of identifying the remains he has been called upon to identify at his lab. I'd love to hear the heroes' stories from the lab and from the survivors.

Copyright Some Soldier's Mom 2006. All rights reserved.