Hey all! I’ve been volunteering recently at a local Vietnam veterans’ “hangout” where these great people come every weekend and just hang around with their buddies and new members! One of the things that I love most about these weekends is these veterans’ stories. They could be sad, happy, funny, or inspirational, but these soldiers always seem to be able tell a unique story every week and tell it in such a way that gets the rest of the people hooked. (One marine told me about the time he was forced to bag air near the submarine’s engine to “test” it for radiation when he was a newbie. Hilarious!)
I’m curious on what stories y’all have, as veterans from any branch, any time period? This will entertain many, I hope!
I wouldn’t even know where to begin unless it was narrowed down and came up in conversation, and I knew which direction to go. Would it be funny, sad, humiliating, inspirational, terrifying, interesting, enraging, depressing, uplifting, shocking? Life is very interesting and complex in the military. Very glad I did it, but I wouldn’t want to do it again!
Not me but here are some of the stories my kids grandpa told my daughter when she was doing a report on him. He was a WWII POW and she was 11 at the time so he wanted some lighter moment to tell her about.
One day his friend came running through the college dorm shouting that they Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. “We all had the same reaction, can you guess what it was”? DD said “ you were mad?” He replied “Nope we all said “Where in the heck is Pearl Harbor”
When he got released from the POW Camp at the end of the war, he still had to finish a year of service. He could choose where though. His mom was like “ great, you can do it at the base 20 min from our house”. He said “ Are you crazy? I’m going to Hawaii!”
Another story about grandpa who is my stepfather. When the scandal about Abu Grahib broke my stepfather started having nightmares. It was too reminiscent of what he had endured. My mom was like you HAVE to see a someone about this and made him an appointment at the VA hospital. He wasn’t happy about it. And here’s how he liked to tell the story from that point: “So my wife makes me go to this stupid appointment and she drops me off to see the shrink and then when she picks me up 1 hr later I’m all smiles and when asked said the experience was “ fantastic’. “See” said my wife “ it’s really good to talk to someone”. And I was like “ well he just put me on 90 percent disability. I’m gonna get money every month!” “ And you know what, I never had another nightmare!”
Of the service members I have known, many of them do not talk about the time that they were serving. If one doesn’t already know the person was a veteran, one would rarely find out from that person.
“ Riddled with survivor’s guilt after his unit lost 17 men in Afghanistan, Marine veteran Anthony Marquez makes it his mission to reconnect with the Gold Star families of the fallen.
