MEANER

Easton is off base in writing “brutality and violence (such as against women) have always been a part of the soldiers’ marching chants.”

No World War II GI would agree with those words. The songs we marched to were upbeat entries such as “For Me and My Gal,” “You’re a Grand Old Flag” and just about anything by George M. Cohan or Irving Berlin. The only slightly sexist lyric I can recall (in a long-forgotten thing called “My Girl’s a Corker”) ran: “She’s got a pair of legs just like two whiskey kegs . . . .” Crude and insensitive, yes, but pretty tame stuff in this era.

DAVID R. MOSS

Los Angeles