Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Let us now praise famous men, and their fathers that begat them - Ecclesiasticus During our brief vacation in Florida -- where we went to see my wife’s brave sister, Sandy, recovering from a bout of cancer – we were able to reconnect with Dick D’Avanzo, an old and true friend. Several years ago, when I was writing columns exclusively for the Journal Inquirer of Manchester, D’Avanzo had called and asked if I could come over to see a letter he had received from a young boy then in a prisoner of war camp in Thailand. The camp was full of the human detritus of the Viet Nam war. The Khmer Rouge occasionally would raid the camp, forcibly impress into service the young boys and rape the young girls. The letters D’Avanzo had received were written by a boy whose family had made it from killing fields, across the perilous Mekong River, into one of the border camps. The letters were, in the precise sense of the term, pitiful, all of them written in English in longhand with a pen on rough paper. ...