77 years now...
My father, John W. Edwards, was there.
He was rotated in to the 26th as a replacement, arriving in France in August, just in time to join in marching under the Arc de Triomphe after the liberation of Paris.
He fought in the Hurtgen Forest, until they were rotated to the Ardennes for “rest.” He led a few of the patrols that brought back intelligence that the Germans were massing for an attack—intelligence that was ignored.
His unit was entirely overrun at the start of the battle of the Bulge. He was captured and force-marched to a prisoner of war camp in central Germany where he spent the next 5 or so months (and lost half his body weight).
He had two kinds of war stories: those he would tell while sober, and those he would tell only if he had had a few. For the rest of his life, if there were loud noises at night, he would wake up thinking he was being shelled.
He passed away in 2004 at the ripe old age of 84.