Have you ever asked your relatives about their wartime experience?

You know, I know lots of stories but I don't think I've actually sat down and asked to hear them.

the public records office has been good for dredging up some details though i'm no nearer to finding out why one great-grandfather was cheated out of a VC and another had a collection of ex-top secret WW1 tank test photos

spent an hour there last week reading about W12 an how it was affected by the war - wormwood scrubs had anti-aircraft guns all over it, the factories a bit further west were big targets so it got quite a battering.

i read a while ago that there are only like 50 surviving veterans of WWI, and feeling kinda sad about that. someone ought to try and interview as many of them as they can while they're still around.

haha!

I have a great uncle who was a pilot in WW2. He's past 80. . .I should really talk to him.

Besides that the only other war relatives served in was Vietnam. But as Maria said there are also great immigrant stories to be told.

We were very not to ask him anything about it. Very.

My dad was drafted during Vietnam but managed to get stationed in Germany and never saw any "action", so his stories are fairly boring Radar O-Reilly army-office-clerk type stuff.

You know he's been around the world
Last night he flew to Baghdad
In his magical armchair
Cigarettes and a six pack, he just got back
Now the spit's flying everywhere

Hey, hey, hey, hey (Your Uncle Walter's going on and on)
You're back so late (Where did you go that you were gone so long)
How could you leave me here so long with Uncle Walter

Your Uncle Walter saw who fired the shots
He drove his chair in the cavalcade
He's flown from South Africa
To countries where
They beat themselves on the backs with chains
There was a fleet of battleships
And 1 reclining chair
Headed north on the Arabian Sea
Now he's back to tell us what
He and his oldest boy Blair
They're getting rich with their mail order scheme

Oh, oh (Your Uncle Walter's going on and on)
We're so glad you're home (Where did you go that you were gone so long)
How could you leave me here so long with Uncle Walter

Your Uncle Walter told me
Everything he'd do if he was president
Oh what a perfect world
This world would be
If he was President now
But he's not

And he sees the children smoking pot
He knows that in a moment
They'll be shooting up heroin
Teardrops in his armchair
A 50 minute lecture
Tobacco juice rolling down his chin

Hey, hey, hey, hey (Your Uncle Walter's going on and on)
You're back so late (Where did you go that you were gone so long)
How could you leave me here so long with Uncle Walter

After that, he transferred over to the Pacific and made a couple SFHawaii runs until one weekend just before shipping out on another run when he and a buddy of his picked up some girls and ran off to Yosemite. They were late getting back and missed the ship, which ended up being sunk with all hands by a Japanese submarine. After that, my dad figured that he used up more than his allotment of nine lives and returned home to Ithaca where he got a job at the Ithaca Gun Company. My mom was working there assembling combat shotguns (a regular Rosie The Riveter!) and that's how they met.

Grandpa stayed in the Navy until 1948. He didn't see my dad until 6 mos after he was born. He came home to become a firefighter, until smoke-inhalation incurred during a successful rescue caused him to lose a bit of a lung and retire to installing heaters and sump pumps. Grandpa remained a volunteer firefighter for decades, and too many chistmas mornings spent putting out fires is why my family never uses a real christmas tree.

And now a new generation of veterans inherits the same burden.

Judging by what I've heard from my father and his other brothers though, he never much talked about it, but it really changed him. From the stories I've been told by them, he was involved in some pretty messy things and killed quite a lot of people, not all men, both in Vietnam and in black ops stuff after the war.

One of my oldest friends served in Iraq and was in Fallujah when all of the major fighting was happening there. He similarly hasn't talked much about it since he's been home and out of the service, and I don't ask. If he wants to discuss it, I'll wait for him to volunteer any info.