Every year there is either a shortage or an oversupply of flu vaccine, and it is either earmarked for particularly flu-susceptible categories of the population or available for free at every community center and grocery store clinic. The CDC has declared the week following Thanksgiving National Influenza Vaccination Week; their message is that it’s not too late to get a shot since February is usually the peak flu month. Many people are careless about getting the shot, willing to take the chance of experiencing an annoying couple of days of discomfort and inconvenience, but epidemiologists and even casual students of history are well aware of the potential this illness has for creating havoc with the national well-being. The Great Influenza by John M. Barry includes every excruciating detail about the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 which may have killed 100 million people around the globe and was an equal-opportunity destroyer across locations and age groups. When my Granddaddy Melker was a soldier in France in the First World War, he received a letter from their Lutheran pastor about the death of Granddaddy’s beloved younger sister, Margaret, pictured here perhaps a year before she became a casualty of influena. Margaret’s death, in a small coal-mining community in Pennsylvania, exemplified the realities of that flu: it was not confined to populous areas and was fatal to large numbers of seemingly healthy young adults. There is a sad incongruity in the idea that an earnest and uncomplicated young man, still a teenager himself, could have traveled halfway around the world to experience mind-altering combat only to learn that an even worse tragedy had occurred back in his peaceful mountain home.