My mom had a job in the engineering department at Bell Aircraft, and her last project was the X1 Glamorous Glynnis, that Chuck Yaeger took past the sound barrier. What is seriously depressing is recently we sat there and watched a documentary about the X1 on TV and she didn’t remember a damned thing about it. Alzheimers sucks ass.
Mom’s father was in WW1, and fought in the trenches, was sent home after being gassed.
Her eldest and next eldest brothers were in WW2 as combat infantry, and her youngest brother was in Vietnam in the Navy as a deck ape on a destroyer.
My dad joined the army, armored infantry, combat infantry and corps of engineers at various times, just prior to WW2 and retired in 1969. Silver star, 2 bronzes, assorted other bling for not playing nicely with the other children over the years. He was a bit miffed at the bronzes being passed out like candy to the various chairborn rangers in Vietnam.
Next youngest uncle served in Korea, in the Navy sub service.
Third uncle couldn’t join any branch at all, he had serious health issues.
MrAru’s father was a photographer in the Navy, and back in the mid 50s [peacetime] was one of the staff photographers for the Blue Angels. He also arranged a Playboy party for his frat when he was exercising his military benefits and going to school to become a teacher
Dad: Airborne Ranger, served three tours in Vietnam. Officially did not parachute into Cambodia under heavy fire . . . those gray marks in his knee are unofficial shrapnel.
GrandFather: Stormed Normandy beach along with his best buddy Jim, who made a deal with God that he’d become a priest if he survived the ordeal. Grandad lived to create us, and Father Jim to get us baptised and married. Cigarettes got them both in the end.
Cousin: West Point Graduate currently serving in Afghanistan. Both she and her husband have been in and out of Iraq several times over the last few years.
For 13 generations in the Celt family there’s been a war to fight and a Celt to fight it.
May my Grand Celtlings be the first not to see one.
My father was working in South America when he got drafted for World War II and had to return to the states. He wound up in the Army Air Corps and helped build landing strips and such in India.
In WWII:
Dad was a USAAF attack bomber pilot with 98 missions in the Pacific.
Mom was a recent Stanford grad who went to work for Bethlehem Steel in San Francisco.
My dad was in the Navy as an aircraft mechanic. He was stateside for the duration.
My mother was taking care of 2 young kids on a Navy base, actually 3 different ones as dad was moved around.
Interestingly, no member of my immediate family has served in the US Armed Services.
My mother’s family immigrated from what was then East Germany in 1948. Neither of her brothers was of a service-appropriate age during wartime, and neither elected to join the armed services (her older brother is an academic and her younger brother had a criminal record by then and they wouldn’t have him). None of my cousins joined up.
My dad’s family came over sometime in the mid-1700’s, but they were southerners - fought for the Confederacy. Then got on with the business of raising cows and Hell in Texas. Missed WWI by virtue of not having any men who were of an appropriate service age (my grandfather was 17 when it ended and he was the oldest of his generation). They all missed WWII by a combination of age, being dead already and being exempted for various reasons. My dad was too young for WWII, too old for Korea (and had only one eye to boot) and his generation was pretty thin on the ground - he was the only boy (nice young ladies in the South during my dad’s generation did not serve in the military). Mostly my grandfather’s brothers all managed to get themselves killed spectacularly through some combination of motor vehicles (planes, cars, boats, you name it) and boozing before they had kids.
My brother was born several years after Vietnam ended, and was in high school during Desert Storm - and had no inclination to join the armed services after high school.
My mother was a civilian nurse. My father was a Staff Sergeant in the (Army) Air Force, who claims to have made Lockbourne AFB in Columbus, Ohio safe for democracy. He never saw combat, although he trained for the invasion of Japan.
I’ve always found their stateside story more interesting. My father tried to enlist after Pearl Harbor. He failed his physical, and married my mother six weeks later. Eight months after that, with my mother pregnant, he was drafted. My mother and my older sisters ended up living with my father’s parents (and my father’s baby brother) throughout the War.
Both grandfathers: In the US Army in WW1, only 1 went to France, though. His Engineers regiment built roads to let ambulances reach the wounded. After the Armistice, they occupied part of Germany until rotating home. He did let it slip once, to his wife, that the unit’s first assignment at reaching the front was burial duty - after that, even when he was past 100, he always refused to talk about anything that happened before the Armistice.
FIL: B-24 top gunner / radio operator based in Italy, neared the end of his quota when they got hit by flak over Germany, then downed by a fighter over the Adriatic. Half the crew drowned because the life rafts were shot up, but he was able to pull a couple of wounded men out so they could float together in their Mae Wests. Decades later, he found by accident that the mayor of the town he and MIL had moved to had been in another B-24 BG and had reported sighting them, directing the rescue ship. He has never liked talking about it, either, just like most heroes.
Father: Drafted out of Juilliard during Korea, basic at Fort Dix, singing ability got him onto the “Soldiers On Parade” show on Philly TV every weekend instead of crap base duty. Then got assigned to the Army Counter-Intelligence Corps (despite not being Mormon or Jewish, but the family can pass for the latter and his name fits, so we think they were just confused). When the selection of his graduating class at Fort Holabird was made for deployment to Korea, they started at the back of the alphabet and filled the quota before reaching him (otherwise my father might have been some total stranger ). Spent the war in NYC, attending events held by suspected communist sympathizers looking for other Army personnel (they all could spot each other), and being scared by McCarthy. And he once got to interview Eleanor Roosevelt over somebody’s security clearance. Told the re-enlistment recruiter where to go.
My mom and dad got married in June of 1941. After Pearl Harbor they fully expected he would be drafted soon. However for a while married men were not taken. Then they started drafting married men but not fathers. My older sister was born in April 1942. Some time after that, the military started drafting anybody, and again my parents fully figured he would be drafted soon. This was about to happen, but the steel plant in which Dad worked said, “Hey, you can’t take ALL the able-bodied men. Somebody has to make this steel, and there are jobs that women are not strong enough to do.” So Dad spent the war making steel.
Meanwhile on the other side of the Atlantic my future inlaws were displaced persons from the Ukraine trying to avoid capture by both the Communists and the Nazis. They left home in late 1942 with my future husband, six months old (I figure he had to have been an “accident”) and a 6-year old. They eventually spent time in German POW camps and work camps. The older child was shell-shocked and was never normal after that. My husband never knew any other life besides being on the road and was fine. Although he did once get pneumonia and a German doctor’s wife insisted that the doctor try to do something for this little blond-haired, blue-eyed tyke. The doctor figured what the heck, let’s try out this brand-new thing called penicillin and see if it works or not. Fortunately, it did.
Grandfather fought in France, WWI. Dad was a Bushmaster (147th FAB, 158th R.C.T.) in WWII. He fought in the Philippines and New Guinea and spent a little while in Tokyo. He spent a couple weeks in a field hospital in New Guinea with malaria. He died in October at 89.
My father was the radio operator in a half track in Europe in WW II, in the 10th Armored Division. He was very active in his battalion level veterans group, and I even have (and have read) a history of it. One company in his battalion was in Bastogne, not his.
After the war and before he got out he used his restaurant skill to run an officer’s club in southern Germany. He had one guy from the SS working for him, and, since he was Jewish kid from New York, this was pretty fun for him.
Dad worked in intelligence. He was fluent in German, and landed the day after D-Day to interpret radio communications. His unit was subjected to artillery fire (like everybody else there I guess) and received some decorations for his work. Later he interrogated Nazi officers. Like many of the WWII vets, he wasn’t fond of telling war stories though. I think they experienced things they didn’t want to relive.
My dad was a half tech geek half commando in WWII. He was a Thompson gunner in his unit, which was tasked with going behind German lines, sometimes infiltrating by parachute, and laying communications wire.
He rarely talked about his wartime experiences, but the first time he did was when I was 13 or so and found a picture of him and some of his buddies. It was dated June 2, 1944. Normandy, France.
As long as we’re going back further, G-Grandfather was in the Civil War, was captured at Second Bull Run. A G-G-Grandfather ferried troops on the Ohio River during the Civil War. A fourth-great grandfather was a Lieutenant in the Revolutionary War.
Mom and Dad graduated Franklin College in '44 or so. He was a 2nd Lt. in the US Army in Yurp. I don’t think he saw combat. Mom worked in the payroll office of an airplane factory in Dayton, OH.
My older brother worked electronics and computers for the Army in peacetime S. Korea. My younger brother did two hitches in the Navy tweaking computers.
My number came up during the Vietnam war, and I flunked out of the draft physical. I was happy about that, and Dad was angry at my happiness. He thought I should have been disappointed and ashamed.
My dad was a machinist on the USS Iowa and the USS Macon during the Korean Conflict. It was a way to get off the farm for him and away from his evil stepmother. He doesn’t talk about it much (I only recently found out that he had been in Cuba during his enlistment.) but he seems to have good memories of it.
). Spent the war in NYC, attending events held by suspected communist sympathizers looking for other Army personnel (they all could spot each other), and being scared by McCarthy. And he once got to interview Eleanor Roosevelt over somebody’s security clearance. Told the re-enlistment recruiter where to go.