Have you ever asked your relatives about their wartime experience?

the other half are spanish, it's one thing to talk about what sb did in ww1 or 2, civil war is something people don't like to bring up but all my elderly spanish family are now dead (last one went this january)

I also have an aunt whom you just don't bring up the Vietnam War around. Her fiance was killed while serving in Vietnam a couple of months into his service. Incidentally, her brother, i.e. another uncle of mine, served a couple of tours of duty in Vietnam. I don't know if he ever talked about it when he got out, but I do know he died of cirrhosis of the liver caused by heavy alcoholic drinking. I don't know enough to determine if the two are related.

My dad went in to his local draft board once he got his card in the mail but was turned down from service (this would have been early into the Vietnam conflict) because he was considered the sole surviving male in the family. The above paragraph describes only half-siblings of his, people he wasn't actually raised with, so they only counted his dad in as "family". His father (my grandfather) died while serving in Korea when my dad was a teenager. By that time, though, my dad and his dad had a very strained, distant relationship, and my dad's dad was remarried with another kid.

I can't count the number of other relatives I have who've seen combat. Some can't talk about it, some don't remember, others have passed on, and a lot of those individuals do and can talk about their experiences. This last classification will probably apply to the two relatives of mine (cousins) who are currently serving in Iraq as their family is old guard, die-hard Republicans who still think the president is doing a great job.

My God this was a long post.

Ten years ago, I got to know my grandmother's younger cousin who was around 75 years old. One night we were drinking vodka and he was talking about his military service. I asked him if he served during wartime, and his reply was "Yeah, but I never got to see any action."

The way he said "any action" almost had a tinge of regret in it. Amazing what differences you can find between his generation's and the baby boomers' attitude toward war.

I don't mind quality threads being over here at the sandbox. It's kind of like in Contact where Gary Busey's son blows up the big space thing, but there's a spare one for Jodie Foster over in Asia.

there's that, but most of the traffic has returned to ilx proper, so i figured i would crosspost it.