Follow Friday - Thirty-Seven Is the Smallest Non-Supersingular Prime

It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:

1. Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
2. Follow the two Featured Bloggers of the week - Mother Lode and The Book Nympho.
3. Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
4. Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
5. Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
6. If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
7. If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
8. If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!

And now for the Follow Friday Question: In light of 11/11/11 and Veteran’s Day, tell us about your favorite soldier and how he or she is saving the world. Fictional or real life.

I'm going to answer this the way I think a lot of people will answer this by tagging my two late grandfathers as my favorite soldiers. Both were World War II veterans.

My maternal grandfather was Paul A. Wright. He had no middle name and chose the middle initial "A" when he enlisted so that he could be at the front of any list of Paul Wrights that was alphabetized. He had to get a special exemption to enlist because he was working in a "war critical" industry at the time (as a truck driver for an oil company). He served in North Africa, but then went to paratrooper school and joined the 101^st Airborne just in time to be in the defense of Bastogne. After the war he came home, settled down, got a job working for the oil company and didn't talk about the war very much. He lived long enough to see me get married, but died before either of my kids were born.

My paternal grandfather was Joe Thomas Pound. He joined the Army Air Corps and flew multi-engine planes. My favorite story I heard from him was his first flying assignment. After finishing flight school, he was waiting for orders and saw a notice on the base bulletin board seeking pilots who wanted to volunteer for duty. He was bored and showed up for the meeting. They were looking for pilots to ferry planes to England. Because he had eight hours of experience in this type of plane, and his friend (and copilot) only had four, he was commander for the flight. Having grown up in a small town in Indiana, this flight was his first time out of the United States, and his first time seeing the ocean. The group started with one hundred planes. When they got to England after an all-night flight, they only had ninety-one. No one knows what happened to the other nine planes. They probably got lost somewhere over the North Atlantic and crashed into Greenland or the sea.

He eventually ended up flying supplies from Burma to China for most of the war, taking material to help supply the Chinese nationalist army "over the hump" (as the pilots called the Himalayas). After the war he used the G.I. Bill to go to college and launched my family on a completely different trajectory than it would have been otherwise. He worked as an accountant for a while, and then went back into the Air Force and stayed in the service for most of the rest of his life - he loved to fly. He was one of my favorite people in the world, and he died much too young when I was still in high school.

Go to previous Follow Friday: Thirty-Six Is Six Squared

Go to subsequent Follow Friday: The Thirty-Eighth Parallel Separates the Two Koreas

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