But my dad was a sophomore at The Citadel. He was sitting in the language lab, listening to a Spanish-language shortwave broadcast. When the announcer came on the radio and said that Pearl had been bombed, he wasn't sure he had heard it correctly - so he called the instructor over, and he listened, and told him that indeed he HAD heard it correctly.
Dad's mom had a friend on the draft board back home in Rome GA, who told her that his number would be coming up. So he didn't bother to go back to school for spring semester, figuring he would pay all that tuition and just get drafted and lose all his credits and his (or his mom's) money too. So he hung around home, got bored, and went down and enlisted! North Africa, Italy, Trieste, and the Greek elections . . . got shot at but everybody mostly missed, he was wounded very slightly but too embarassed to take a Purple Heart.
Another relatively minor,but revealing,tidbit of info about what is rightly called "The Greatest Generation". Kerry,for one,wasn't nearly as easily embarrassed as was your Dad.