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WW2 vets

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posted on Nov, 9 2008 @ 04:29 PM
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I had an interesting experience today. As you know, Remembrance Day is just around the corner. I was at church earlier, and there is this guy who fought in WW2 in France who wore the usual poppy, but also wore the medals that he got for his service. Interested, I asked him about his experiences in the war and what the medals were for and stuff like that. The point I want to make though, is not about his particular experiences, but the realization that I had after speaking with him.

This guy is 87 years old, and he enlisted when he was 18, in 1939. After thinking about that, I realized that he is probably among the younger (living) vets that we have, and that it won't be very many years before all the vets are gone, and their stories are left to the history books, rather than as firsthand experiences.

So I would urge everyone who is able to, to find and talk to a war veteran, as part of your respect for Remembrance Day and the sacrifices that those people made so that our generation could live free. (especially those who didn't come home) It's a pretty cool experience, and it'll probably make that guy's day to have some young punk show interest in the war :p

If memory serves, these are the awards he had:
1939-1945 Star (No bar)
Canadian Volunteer Service Medal (with volunteer bar and Dieppe bar)
France and Germany Star
Croix de Guerre (given to him by Charles de Gaulle personally) (he and a couple other guys rescued 20 prisoners while under fire)
There were two more, since he had 6 medals on, but I don't remember their names, unfortunately, and I didn't see anything that looked like them.



posted on Nov, 9 2008 @ 04:37 PM
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This is a bright idea that I wholeheartedly concur with. I have talked with WW2 veterans myself. You learn a peace of history that isn't in the history books. You learn how it affected the individuals themselves who went through WW2. Several older relatives of mine served in WW2, and so have other older veterans that it's been my pleasure to meet. Korean War vets are another group of vets that should be talked to as well. Some of them also served earleir in WW2. So I also would like to encourage others to talk to vets from WW2 and Korea.



posted on Nov, 10 2008 @ 03:30 AM
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Yeah, I don't think I've ever met a Korean vet, at least knowingly, even though Canada did participate in that war. Unfortunately none of my living relatives fought in the war, so I can't ask them about their experiences.

My one great grandfather fought in WWI, and he wouldn't ever talk about his experiences. All we know is he signed up underage, he was Austrian, so we know what side he was on, and we know that 70 years after the war, he would still wake up screaming at nightmares of whatever he saw over there. I think some of my other great grandfathers were in WWI on the Allies side, but they all died before I was born. One grandfather wasn't a soldier, but he was an army cook, and my other grandfather refused to sign a waiver to go overseas, so they gave him the crappiest domestic jobs possible to try and get him to change his mind, but he didn't budge.

I haven't met a lot of war veterans, partly because being here in Canada, we didn't actually fight in any wars between the Korean War and the Gulf War, which is a pretty big gap, so anyone who has seen war here is either some guy my age in Afghanistan or somebody in their 70s (for Korea) or older (for WW2). I do have a friend who did some peacekeeping in Bosnia (he actually introduced me to ATS) but he never saw any combat, though the potential was there.



posted on Dec, 5 2008 @ 06:30 PM
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need info about a B-17 that went by the name " circumcisor ". That`s all the info i have. Friend of mine was 1 of the flightcrew. has passed on for years now.irancontra



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