United States Veterans Day

[Guest _rick]

Today is Veterans day. Please take a moment to remember those who serve and served.

_rick

[subaruguru]

Today is Veterans day. Please take a moment to remember those who serve and served.

While huddled under a hypo canopy at yesterday's Cold Water Workshop Suz shared her homemade gorp, which included bits of dried apricot paste. I remember discovering this stuff in sheet form back in the early 60's, and surprised my Dad with a gift-wrapped roll of it for Father's Day. His facial expression of disgust as he tossed it away, saying he had hoped to never see this stuff again certainly perplexed me. He then told me that he had to live on GI issue sheets of this "treat" for three days in the winter of '44 in the brutal Hurtgen Forest before evacuation for trenchfoot. I learned that he was a sharpshooter assigned to a three-man machinegun group, and probably killed about 30 Germans from D+10 through to peacekeeping in Czech in late '45. He was too poor to take advantage of the new GI Bill, instead becoming a skilled jeweler and model-maker, and designed all of Swank's cufflinks and tie clasps for 40 years. He NEVER spoke of his experiences in the ETO, his records having gone up in smoke in the archives fire in '78, his untimely death upon retirement in '88. I've since become an avid reader of WWII literature , always hoping to glimpse a bit of what assuredly must've been the horrors he endured.