Good Morning.

I'm headed to a funeral this morning, so I'll only be posting the stats today.

Today is our 3,915th day in Afghanistan.

We'll start this morning as we always do; with the latest casualty figures from our ongoing war, courtesy of Antiwar.com:

US Military Deaths - Afghanistan: 2,021
Other Military Deaths - Afghanistan: 1,032

We find this morning's cost of war passing through:

$ 1, 346, 232, 925, 000 .00

So today, we go to lay Ray Moore to rest.

My great-uncle was the last member of the family with WWII service...like most of his generation, all of my elder uncles went to war. Some went to Europe, some went to Pearl, one lucky one hooked up with a music unit and stayed stateside.

Uncle did both sides. His ship, the USS Aries, started out on the North Atlantic run, and eventually went through the canal to support the final drives against Japan.

After the war, uncle went back to playing music...as I found out last night, with his own big band, "Ray Moore and his Men of Rhythm". Eventually, he married his lead singer and settled in to a post-war life.

I'd guess he went to school on the GI bill and became an engineer; there's pictures in that slideshow of him in stereotypical engineer garb working on some items that are on the moon. Yes, my uncle built accelerometers and other instruments that Neil Armstrong left behind.

Jim Lovell came to thank my uncle too...in his book "Lost Moon", Mr. Lovell doesn't mention him by name, but he does tell the story of the Draper Lab engineer that took all the instruments home and left them outside overnight to see how much electricity they would draw from a cold start.

Back when the movie came out, uncle told us the same story about how he helped rescue Apollo 13....after reading the book, I was absolutely floored.

Finally....my Uncle was also an Eagle Scout (Class of '37), the only member of the family to earn the award. In later years, I spent some time at the same Scout Camp that he went to as a boy.

So once again.....Rest in Peace, you old Eagle. You earned it.