Reply #18: My dad was one of the older men in the army

[eridani]

After Pearl Harbor, he figured he probably wouldn't be much use owing to the heart problems that were just then becoming evident. He was eventually drafted in 1944, though, when recruiters were scraping the bottom of the barrel. ("I heard we were supposed to get an eye exam." "Nope. At this point we just count 'em.") These draftees and later enlistees were either notably older (28+) or notably younger (17, plus more than a few younger kids who lied about their ages) than the ones who signed up immediately after Pearl Harbor. So dad, with a receding hairline and a touch of premature grey, instantly became "Pops." They knew perfectly well that he could't do combat, so they put him in the Signal Corps, the group responsible for changing the code books on a daily basis. (I once asked if he had ever known any of the Navajo code talkers, but that was a different group.)

When I was a kid, dad had lots of funny war stories--things like one of the guys in his unit applying for and getting a Purple Heart for tripping and scraping his knee running for an air raid shelter. The laughing stock of the unit--until they totalled up the points that determined who got to go home first and the Purple Heart put him over the top. How you scored beer when the officers are looking the other way, and got it nice and cold by dripping aviation fuel on top of it and letting it evaporate. He made his contribution and was never in any serious danger. My mom's youngest sister married a man who had been in the island fighting in the Pacific, and he never said anything at all about his experiences. My cousins heard not one single word from their father on the subject, ever. Having read some of the accounts of those battles, I understand why. I suspect he stayed sane by putting all of it in a separate mental compartment and shutting the door permanently.

Marge Piercy's Gone to Soldiers is an excellent novel about the Greatest Generation, capturing the war on the home front as well as on the battlefield. http://www.margepiercy.com/books/gone-to-soldiers.htm