Operation Market Garden

Day 2 of the Risk battle in the house just completed and I'm feeling more confident than I did a few hours ago. Going into todays battle, Katie had the obvious upper hand, but with a few fortuitous rolls on my part I gained strength in both Europe and the America's. She still holds more territories than I do, but most of the holds aren't strongholds and are ripe for the attacking.

I also employed my first tactical move of the game today! I could have turned my cards in on my turn and recieved 4 troops, but knowing her hand was forced and needed to turn in some on her next turn I passed - she took the 4 and I got 6 on my next go around. I'm not McArthur, but I'm not an idiot either.

You'll notice I labled this post "Operation Market Garden" and with good reason. As most of you are probably well aware, Operation Market Garden was a 9 day Allied operation against the Germans in WWII. Fought in the Netherlands and Germany, the crux of the operation centered on taking certain bridges. Most fell with few shots fired, but Nijmegen and Arnhem were considered faliures and the operation as a whole a faliure. The Allied did lose that battle but did win the war and I'm hoping that day one's loses and day two's victories for me play out the same.........

Ok, so none of you were probably aware of much of anything I said above and I'm not really that big of a history geek. It's just that I've watched about every single WWII movie and documentary and played every Playstation 2 game on WWII. All of the games feature Market Garden in them at some point...... yeah, maybe it makes me a geek.

Anyways, based off the "facts" from the game's, it's apparent that there were 80,000 Germans and 1 Allied trooper in the entire war. I could believe that if the soldiers name was Chuck Norris, but I've never found the button on my controller that delivers a roundhouse kick to the face, so I don't think it's Chuck. We could have ended that war a lot earlier if Chuck Norris would have been there.......... Chuck would have went in Walker, Texas Ranger style, karate chopped every German into submission, then put his arm around them in the end and we would have all learned a valuable lesson about being friends that we could all apply in our lives.

Faithfully submitted
This 30th day of January.
Douglas C. Niedermeyer
Sgt. At Arms