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I originally posted this in the Idiots thread as it seemed the most appropriate, but was encouraged to spin it off into its own thing.Moon Slayer posted:Here's something a little bit different, but which I think people might find interesting. After he moved into a retirement community in the late 2000's, my grandpa took and then taught a writing class. Doing so inspired him to sit down and write a bunch of anecdotes from his life, including his military service. So, this is what it was like to enlist in the Navy in 1943. Let's continue. Comments and context:
Next up is part 3: Grandpa Goes to Camp Pendleton and Points Further West.
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# ? Feb 23, 2024 17:08 |
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# ? Jun 22, 2024 22:30 |
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And here's part 3: Comments and context:
Next up will be part 4: Grandpa Lands on Guam, or: poo poo Gets Kind of Real.
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# ? Feb 24, 2024 03:00 |
I love all of this so much. Have you considered (or has it been done already) donating this to his/your local university's history department? Oral history like this is so hard to get, so I'm sure they would love to take it in to their collections.
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# ? Feb 24, 2024 05:15 |
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That's definitely something I'll look into. It'll be pretty easy now that all the pages have been scanned and I've emailed copies to every family member that has a computer.
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# ? Feb 24, 2024 06:49 |
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Part 4: Comments and context:
I'm going away for a couple days, so this'll be the last update until Monday afternoon. In the meantime, please share your own stories of grandparents at war!
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# ? Feb 24, 2024 18:39 |
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Moon Slayer posted:I'm going away for a couple days, so this'll be the last update until Monday afternoon. In the meantime, please share your own stories of grandparents at war! These are great, thank you for sharing them. I'm struck by both the recognizable similarities and vast differences between what his wartime experiences were and my own WoT quasi-wartime, serving in the Navy but with the Marines as a greenside corpsman. Both my grandfathers served during World War II, although one only technically and neither in combat, but I think they're both interesting stories in terms of showing different aspects of the war from the ones that history tends to spotlight. My mother's father joined the Navy for what I suspect were similar reasons to your grandad. As a Central Texas farmboy who grew up during the Great Depression he wanted to do something as different as possible for what he saw as his inevitable term of service, so he joined the Navy rather than wait for the Army to draft him. (As a side note, I'm given to understand that this was actually a bit discouraged by the War Department bureaucracy because enlistment was unpredictable. By drafting people they could figure statistically that they'd have so many thousands of troops get through training and be ready by this date in this service, but if more people than expected enlisted ahead of schedule they'd have to make a small effort to find the next guys on the list and rework their plans. Apparently more than a few people after the whole machine got spun up were told by their local enlistment office to wait for their letter.) Anyway Grandpa A joined the Navy and seems to have tested as meeting a certain level of mathematical ability, so he was shunted into an aviation navigation training program. He did so well in that course that he was retained as an instructor and spent his war in Wichita, Kansas training navigators to not get lost in a PB4Y-2 Privateer (the Navy's patrol bomber version of a B-24 Liberator, distinguished by a single vertical stabilizer). Which you'd think would be a very safe posting, but he did in fact get injured when he was struck by a jeep being driven by a drunk sailor one night and broke a leg. It didn't really interfere with his duties and he healed up fine so they kept him in service until the war ended. After the war he used the GI Bill to go to college in Indiana, where he met my grandmother and got a history degree. He taught middle school and became a principal until he retired. I'll post my other grandfather's story later this evening.
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# ? Feb 24, 2024 21:33 |
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God the whole "base had no idea we were coming and just kinda told us to muster and get lost" never changes
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# ? Feb 26, 2024 04:04 |
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I'm back with part 5: Grandpa Commits an Act of Piracy. Comments and context:
Next time, part 6: War's Over so We're Finally Giving You A Shipboard Posting
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# ? Feb 26, 2024 18:32 |
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Moon Slayer, thank you for posting these. I'm really enjoying them, and love how clean and clear your Grandfather's hand written notes are.
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# ? Feb 26, 2024 18:49 |
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Thank you; I'll admit I'm pleasantly surprised by how many people seem to be enjoying these.
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# ? Feb 26, 2024 19:12 |
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Oh yeah, these are great. War is told way too often from the viewpoint of a satellite that can't see anything other than unit formations, map points and dates of the big battles. But war is personal, it's unique for every participant and it is descriptive and sobering in a way that a general's hand waving of events could never be.
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# ? Feb 26, 2024 19:20 |
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Part 6: Comments/context:
Next time, part 7: Grandpa Attempts to Game the Liberty Card System, Gets Arrested Moon Slayer fucked around with this message at 01:57 on Feb 27, 2024 |
# ? Feb 27, 2024 01:53 |
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Part 7: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MLvcrnP3hY
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# ? Feb 27, 2024 22:06 |
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This thread fucks hard. That song is still used the same way in the Modern Military, too.
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# ? Feb 27, 2024 22:11 |
Thanks for sharing these!
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# ? Feb 28, 2024 16:08 |
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Part 8: Comments and context:
Kind of an anticlimactic end*, but I get the sense that that's what the finale for most people's military service was like. Upon arriving home and finding out that all the money he and his older brother had been sending home all war had been spent by his alcoholic father, grandpa used the GI Bill to get a teaching degree (seems like it was a popular choice for vets), met grandma who was also a teacher, and settled in a tiny town in western MN, teaching science and social studies for the next 40 years or so. *except it isn't really the end, because there's a few more pieces of his writing that touch on his military service, including a disastrous attempt to get into radio, a return to Guam later in life, and his volunteer work restoring the USS Missouri. I'll post them over the next few days. Moon Slayer fucked around with this message at 18:35 on Feb 28, 2024 |
# ? Feb 28, 2024 18:30 |
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Radio Comments and context:
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# ? Feb 29, 2024 18:32 |
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Thanks for posting these.
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# ? Feb 29, 2024 23:20 |
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Grandpa and the Missouri That rear end in a top hat who barged in and grabbed the first ticket has had a family vendetta against him for over twenty years. Someday we'll find him.
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# ? Mar 1, 2024 03:16 |
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Here's something a little bit different: an account written by my grandpa's older brother Gene. Gene was a year older than grandpa and ended up in the Army, but spent a much longer time in training to be a paratrooper, getting to the Pacific about the same time grandpa did. He was part of the 511th Parachute Infantry Regiment which landed in the Philippines. Here's his account of the first time he saw combat: Comments and context:
Is there a place to look up Silver Star commendations?
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# ? Mar 3, 2024 22:50 |
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Not a single complete source- you're best bet is to just try searching name + silver star E- or check if there is a unit history page type thing
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# ? Mar 3, 2024 23:56 |
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Oh cool, you don't hear much about combat jumps in the Pacific.
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# ? Mar 4, 2024 01:21 |
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Grandpa's thoughts on war in general. This one's a bit meandering, almost stream-of-consciousness.
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# ? Mar 7, 2024 23:47 |
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I'm really glad you're posting these.
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# ? Mar 8, 2024 00:03 |
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Thank you for posting that. Your grandpa seems to have been a thoughtful man.
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# ? Mar 8, 2024 02:01 |
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Grandpa goes back to Guam, part 1: Someday I plan to go to Guam as well.
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# ? Mar 9, 2024 19:25 |
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Grandpa goes back to Guam, part 2: Context and comments:
Moon Slayer fucked around with this message at 02:33 on Mar 12, 2024 |
# ? Mar 12, 2024 02:28 |
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Moon Slayer posted:[*]I would have been 4 when this all happened and I've always wondered what life would have been like if grandma and grandpa had ended up staying on Guam.
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# ? Mar 12, 2024 16:26 |
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booooooo Grandma would never have allowed that: as an English teacher she believed puns were the lowest form of humor.
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# ? Mar 12, 2024 22:26 |
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Grandpa has an Encyclopedia and Thoughts about Afghanistan
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# ? Mar 14, 2024 05:38 |
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Grandpa Also Has Thoughts About Empire Building, Part 1 (or: a reminder that he taught high school social studies for 40 years)
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# ? Mar 15, 2024 22:18 |
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Grandpa Has More Thoughts About Pax Americana And with that we've pretty much reached the end of anything that could be tangentially related to grandpa's military service, which is the reason I figured his writing might be of some interest to people here in the first place. Still, there's a couple more things I could post if people want, like the time he met President Carter, or the time my mom was a toddler and fell off the staircase and he and grandma had an argument about whether or not shaking her was the right thing to do.
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# ? Mar 16, 2024 13:52 |
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Moon Slayer posted:Grandpa Has More Thoughts About Pax Americana The last 6 lines on page 222 certainly haven't aged well. Otherwise this is great stuff and your Grandpa sounds like an outstanding guy.
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# ? Mar 16, 2024 15:59 |
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He was. He was also, in person, a prickly, humorless grouch, and it's clear that in writing he found a way to express himself in ways that he hadn't before. He and my grandma were old-school FDR liberal Democrats and were very active in the teacher's union. In some ways I'm glad he died in 2014 because he already hated Trump for the way he treated Obama with the birther conspiracy poo poo; he would have been extremely unhappy to see Trump in the White House. On the other hand, I'm kind of bummed neither he nor grandma lived to see Biden sworn in because they both would have been ecstatic about another Catholic president -- and especially one with a long pro-union track record.
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# ? Mar 16, 2024 22:58 |
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catching up but lol at "and then I committed piracy because I didn't really think through my plan to get a tasty dinner"
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# ? Mar 17, 2024 23:36 |
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Grandpa Meets the President Comments and context:
Moon Slayer fucked around with this message at 07:45 on Apr 4, 2024 |
# ? Mar 30, 2024 12:46 |
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Grandpa's Kids Cause Chaos; or, That Time My Mom Fell Off the Stairs and Bonked Her Head: Comments and context:
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# ? Apr 4, 2024 07:45 |
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And with that, I've pretty much exhausted grandpa's writings. I'm glad people found these as interesting as I did, and I was especially amused by how many things in the military clearly have not changed at all in 70 years. Thanks for reading!
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# ? Apr 4, 2024 22:29 |
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Thanks for sharing those memories of your grandpa with us.
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# ? Apr 7, 2024 16:23 |
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# ? Jun 22, 2024 22:30 |
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Your grandpa seems like someone I’d really enjoy spending sone time with and just talking. I think he’d have fit in pretty good here.
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# ? Apr 7, 2024 16:39 |