Hey Veterans, Gotta Story To Share! (1 Viewer)

[Samuel]

Thanks everyone for your service and welcome home!

 

[pltrgyst]

Late to the party, as usual. My wife and I both come from heavily-military-influenced families.

My four grandfathers all served in WW1, two American (first generation immigrants, from Germany and Denmark), two Brits. My Welsh mother served as a secretary in the British Army from 1939-1945. My father (and his four brothers) served in the US Army from 1939-1946, spending a year+ in Iceland before the invasion, and going into Omaha Beach on D-Day+1 as a Signal Corps captain. On the plus side, he met my mother in England before the invasion, and went back in 1946 to get married and father me.

I made the mistake of taking a semester off from college in 1965, and got my "Greetings from the President" draft notice on New Year's Eve. So I raced my butt over to the recruitment office and enlisted to get a choice of specialty (05B, radio operator, not knowing that's about the highest death-rate job in the whole army). I went in on Valentines Day '66. Luckily, I was identified for Ordnance OCS right away, and got my commission ten months later. Two years in Germany, in a rail maintenance unit that owned all the army rail equipment in Europe, including the Berlin trains, a great job. Made it to all the Formula 1 races in Europe in 1967, and bought my first Porsche and first Alfa.

Then another brain fart and stupidly (again) volunteered for Vietnam. Spent two years, '68-'70, as a captain in the Central Highlands (Qui Nhon/An Khe/Pleiku), company commander of a 300-man electronics maintenance unit (98TH LEM Company -- oddly enough, now located in Alaska). Had my choice of duty assignment when I came back, met my first wife a few months later, and spent my last few years at scenic Fort Dix, NJ. Came out on the promotion list for major, realized I didn't have my degree yet and wouldn't go much further without it, but with post-war cutbacks going on, the ordnance branch wouldn't send me to school full-time, so I took my $10K bonus, got out after eight years, and went back to school on my own. Put my wife through her last two years of college, picked up a few degrees of my own, and never looked back. Well, except for some years later spent working in SCIFs in the bowels of the Pentagon as a civilian...

And having come back from 'Nam in 1970, to all the shit that was going on, I can't stand it -- make that hate, hate, hate it -- when someone thanks me for my service. I didn't do it for you, or anyone else outside my own family and the atmosphere in which I grew up. (And I know a lot of vets who feel that same way.) I only wear my Vietnam Vet hat now and then when I go downtown to get in the faces of the protestors outside Planned Parenthood, where my wife is a volunteer escort. Fun, fun, fun.

My wife's family is all army, top to bottom. Her dad was a Texas A&M grad, WWII veteran artillery colonel when she was born in Paris, and progressed to two stars (major general). Sadly, serving as commanding general of SETAF (the Southern European Task Force), he was killed in a plane crash in 1969. Her oldest brother, a gung-ho Special Forces captain, was killed barely a year later in a firefight in 'Nam after three weeks in-country. They're both buried at Fort Sill, OK, where her father was once the commandant. Her third brother served his thirty years, retiring a full colonel, after many years in the Pentagon's peacekeeping office (where he was the primary author of the original plan to keep the Iraqi army intact, instead of turning 500,000 heavily armed men loose in a poor country with no means of support (thank you, piece-of-shit Donald Rumsfeld). He's now wrapping up his career as chief of staff of the US Institute of Peace, an independent, non-partisan institute funded by Congress and tasked with promoting conflict resolution and prevention worldwide.

Thank dog we didn't have kids with all that baggage!

Jesus, all that shit makes me feel old... Life is a lot more fun now, even with COVID-19 around...

 

[Coyote]

I served in my nation's Army for 18 months, from 1995 to 1997,which is obligatory for all male Greek citizens.
I didn't have to fight, but I came quite close (I had to say goodbye to my parents).
In the January 1996 crisis between Greece and Turkey, we (my self-propelled Artillery Battalion) packed up and were ready to deploy on the border.
Our Commander demanded that everybody said goodbye to their parents on the phone. My over-protective mother surprised me positively, by not being hysterical, but rather by wishing us all good luck and Victory.
It was a rough life. The dirt from my hands took months to go away, however I washed them, after the end of my service.

My father's brother fell in combat in 1944, being an Army officer and a Captain with the Greek National Republican League, the major non-communist resistance force in Greece.
In the 1941 front, he was in charge of a mortar platoon and couldn't see the results of his fire.
During a major ambush in 1943, he personally machine-gunned down more than 30 German soldiers in less than a minute and was utterly shocked.
His mother (my grandma) shared his shock. She said "They belonged to some mothers, too".