A Special Thnks To All Veterans

[duckydoty 0]

I would like to thank all the veterans for their serving and sacrifices they made and continue to make for this country. Only those who served can really appreciate what all those sacrifices really are.

Thank You and God Bless You All.

Duckydoty

Bravo Company

82nd Signal Bn

82nd Airborne

[Carver 0]

And I too would like to thank all Vetrans in the free world! If it were not for you guys we would all be speaking German right now! From the bottom of my heart THANK YOU for protecting our freedom and doing what needs to be done!

 

To all the active service men and women thank you as well and be safe!

 

Paul

[Chase Creek 0]

I'd like to share something my brother wrote about our dad and his brothers, veterens of WW2. Every time I read this I get tears in my eyes, thinking of what they endured for us.

 

"Initiation"

 

I'd seen them all by the age of five:

the most glorious battles of the second World War;

Normandy, Anzio, the Battle of the Bulge -

refought by my father and his four brothers

after family dinners on our dinning room table.

Line after imaginary line was drawn

on my mother's checkered linen battlefield -

butter dishes became armored divisions,

and salt shakers enemy gun emplacements.

Cries of laughter, clouds of cigar smoke,

rose over their wartime memories

as the five corporals showed my brother and me

just how exciting the "big war" really was.

My family always won in their stories,

and old Hitler and Tojo took it

on the chin.

 

The lied, of course, I later learned -

there were other stories, less often voiced:

of a vague injury which lopped twenty years

off my youngest uncle's life,

of my father's recurring shell shock

which for forty years drove him to the basement

at the first rumble of a thunderstorm,

of the three weeks he spent vomiting

after the Allied liberation

of the Nazi death camp at Treblinka.

 

hese I learned of later - from my mother,

long after the smoke had cleared -

long after my uncles had gone home -

long after my father had died.

Stories too real to be talked of amoung

brother soldiers -

too real to be mentioned to children,

lest they get the wrong idea.