My maternal grandfather rarely spoke about his experiences during WWII.
When he did it alternated between flippant humor or icy seriousness.
Flippant humor: “I had a knife like that once” (referring to my personal knife I had during my enlistment)
Asked what happened to it.
“Oh, I gave it to a German.”
Never heard of grandpa being friends with any Germans despite being, well, German so we asked what he said.
“He said ‘aaaaaaugh’ and died.”
Icy seriousness, same tale, he talked about being on observation point duty in front of the rest of the squad.
It’s dark, he’s in a shell hole.
He hears someone in front of him whispering in English “Joe? Is that you? Joe?”
He knew or at least thought he knew nobody friendly was “that way” so he waited quietly in the dark.
The guy jumps into the shellhole with him and he clamped a hand over his mouth and stabbed him hoping it wasn’t some stupid fellow soldier who got lost in the dark because apparently that had happened and was a possibility.
So Grandpa then sat there next to this dude all night until it gets light enough for him to see it was a German.
In his rare moments, usually after drinking, he’d talk about the 14 year old Hitler youth he had to shoot because the kid pulled a luger on he and his squad.
He’d kept the Luger for awhile after, never said why.
It probably didn’t make sense why even to him.
My husband told a lot of funny stories, but never talked about the bad stuff. My son has just retired from more than 25 years in Army service, mostly Special Forces—Gulf War 1, 2 8 month fighting seasons in Afghanistan. He has never told me anything about his experiences. However when I asked about his retirement income, a while ago, he said he first had to have disabilities and injuries during service assessed for final retirement income purposes. He has offered no details about this evaluation or need for it. He seems physically normal, alert, and active, but I think he has some anxiety PTSD which results in him nagging me about what I should be doing with my property, which he and brother will inherit when I die, not something I plan to have happen any time soon. Tune for bed, good night.