Video Games

The Maundy Monday Newsletter - This Week in History December 16- 22.

I’m not embarrassed to share that I played lots of video games immediately after graduating college. It was a great way to stay single and develop type II diabetes. My preferred choice of games fell into two categories: sports and World War II.

For sports, I mostly played college football. Toward the end of my video game playing days, I played the college football game in dynasty mode. Basically, it allowed you to be a coach and develop a program where you recruited kids and played multiple seasons.¹

You can pick schools to control, and my initial pick was Navy. I became such a good coach that after a few seasons,² Florida came calling, and I picked them. This was around 2000, so Florida wasn’t winning national titles then.³

Over a week, I won about ten national titles. About twenty years later, I met Anonymous, an actual University of Florida grad. I told her of my accomplishments twenty years earlier. She was certainly impressed, which is one reason she fell for me, and we eventually married.

When I grew tired of winning everything in college football, I would turn back time and help dispose the world of Nazis. I used to play a World War II game that I can’t remember the name of. You begin by parachuting into France and have to shoot your way to Berlin. On the way, you go through Belgium,⁴ and it’s there where the game got a lot tougher.

Around the same time I was winning Purple Hearts, HBO debuted a critically acclaimed drama miniseries called Band of Brothers. It was based on the heroics of Easy Company, 2^nd Batallion, 506^th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101^st Airborne Division.

Like the game, these paratroopers dropped into Western France and shot their way to Berlin. Except it wasn’t a game; it was real life. Along the way, they ran into the Nazis in Belgium. Here, they would experience a bloody battle, ending the German advances and starting the end of World War II. It began on December 16, 1944, and is known as The Battle of the Bugle.

It was a surprise German attack that morning. The Nazis were hoping to cut the Allies into two and allow themselves an opportunity to regain territory they had lost.

But the leader of the New Kids on the Block and that jerk from Billions weren’t having it.⁵ The battle would last one month, one week, and five business days before the Nazis retreated.

In my video game world, the battle was something I had to do a few times between ordering pizza and not dating. But just like the soldier who would go on to star in Office Space and Swingers, I made it through.

Okay, let's highlight what else happened this week. As a reminder, these events celebrate their anniversary, ending in 5 or 0. Here's what I got:

1. The United States Air Force ended “Project Blue Book” on December 17, 1969. Beginning in 1951, the US government was interested in the constant reported activity of unidentified flying objects (UFOs), so we decided to hand over the investigation of everything to the weakest branch of the military. I’m shocked the Air Force didn’t find anything.

2. The Supreme Court upheld the wartime internment of Japanese Americans on December 18, 1944. While we were killing Germans in Belgium, we were rounding up Japanese Americans in California to ensure they weren’t trying to kill “real Americans.” In a 6-3 decision, Korematsu vs. United States ensured we could lock people away. Many years later, President Tonka Truck successfully pulled off keeping people from certain countries out of America, despite the Chief Justice quoting that Korematsu was a terrible decision. In 1988, President Reagan gave those wrongfully imprisoned $20,000 each for their troubles. That’s about $60,000 today.

3. American General William Tecumshe Sherman gave a gift to President Lincoln on December 22, 1864. Sherman wanted to take his soldiers to the beach to celebrate Christmas. So he marched from Ohio through the Confederacy, burning and looting along the way. He and the boys made it to Savannah, Georgia, where Sherman dialed up the President of the United States and told him, “I got you a Christmas gift, the city of Savannah, and some other war stuff that was left here.”

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I'm sure it's going to be a busy week for all of us. I’ll put something together for Friday, but if you want to learn something specific, please let me know sometime today (Monday the 16^th).

Thanks for your support of Okay History. I appreciate you!

Okay,

Chris

We didn’t put up a Christmas tree this year, but Blue used to supervise how we did the lights.

1. Although I was a jock growing up, I never played organized football. My parents weren’t big fans of me getting hit all the time, probably because I’m pretty and I bleed easily. But really, I never pushed them to play. Instead, I got my concussions messing around during school.

2. I’m not sure how long each season took, but I don’t think it was ever more than a day.

3. The only titles the Gators won were with me in my make-believe video game world.

4. Which you would know as the place of waffles

5. I’m forgetting the details. Please bear with me.