This seems like a really sad story. One person says that he didn’t have much family, and no relatives attended his funeral. Someone else said that he had 8 children.
The story of “The Greatest Generation” often gets written as “Young Men go to war, save democracy, come home, go to college, and build Levittown.” But there were a lot of soldiers from WWII who never really put it behind them.
And it seemed like the one war where you weren’t really permitted to carry the ghosts with you, for whatever reason. Maybe because unlike even WWI, it’s always written as a triumph from an American perspective.
“He always said he wanted me to have it, out of all of his eight kids,” Aristigue said. “I adopted him as my own grandpa.”