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To: yldstrk

Once they have seen the horrors of war, maybe it is too much.

Inded! I have worked with WWII and Korean War veterans and they have confided things to me that they witnessed or had to do or experienced at the hands of the enemy How any of them make it back with a sound mind is a miracle.
But the thing is, men who served in those wars did not have the support that the current veterans have. They internalized things and did not speak of them to anyone as a rule. Not family anyway. As an outside party they often told me things and said it was the first time they had spoken of it....and that was decades after the facts. Often we would cry together. There are things I wish I had not been told but I will not repeat them. I just carry them in a very heavy corner of my heart and pray for those who spoke of those things and carried the horrors with them for so long. I have no idea what the suicide rate was for the WWII and Korean War vets. I wonder if it was as bad as the current statistics.


43 posted on 11/20/2012 9:11:27 AM PST by ruesrose (Love is Action!.)
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To: ruesrose
I'm an amateur radio operator and I remember a lot of us talked to one ham who was a Navy vet from WWII. We liked the stories he told about his experiences, he just talked about the general life on ship like his job as an electrician's mate, how they had to shut the lights off to avoid detection from the Jap ships and subs in the pacific and so on. He had to walk in the dark using a flashlight with a slip on it. My father went to Korea (a few years after the war) and remembers how dark it was out over the Pacific and he could see the Milky Way as being very bright. Our WWII vet remembers the same. However, he told us a story that really pained him, he was resistant but he told us how ho ship got torpedoed and 256 of his shipmates were killed and the aftermath he experienced.

I also talked to another WWII vet who was on Tinian when both the Enola Gay and Bocks Car were loaded with the A-Bombs. He watched them do it first with the Enola Gay but did not know at the time. After Tibbits got back, he served him his drink at the officer's club and remembers Tibbets saying over and over again how powerful the bomb was and "What have we done?" My friend also remember fighting two Japanese soldiers at the same time, he shot one, bayonetted the other. he still had nightmares about it until he passed away this year at the age of 90.
102 posted on 11/20/2012 12:55:08 PM PST by Nowhere Man (I miss you Whitey! (4-15-2001 - 10-12-2012). Take care, pretty girl!)
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