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Originally Posted by dewilson58
First of all..............Thank you all for your service to our country. I think this is one thing everyone on ToTV can agree upon (there ain't many blanket agreements).
Second, thank you for the information on this thread.
My father served in WWII & Korean War. He is still alive, but he too has always been very quite about his service to our country. Proud, just very quite. He has mentioned friends who have had many difficulties in the immediate return years.
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My uncle Bill lost a leg, arm and part of his skull as well as 6 of the other members of his 8 man squad when a Panzer tree burst hit above them when they were landing on Anzio.
I took care of him for three months before he went into a nursing home in Itasca, IL and he would sometimes have daytime terrors where he would be reliving some event from the war especially that landing on Anzio. Other times he would ask a family member if she too saw the naked Indian in the room. Not sure if he was pulling our collective legs or not.
He was quite the Itasca hometown hero and treated extremely well but just about everyone. Quite a nice man as well as a WWII hero.
Did have some mental problems from the war injury especially as his age brought on dementia and other problems. I was in Itasca in the Fall of 1994.
I helped other vets when I volunteered at the Veterans of Foreign Wars hospital in Reno, Nevada in 1977-1978 for a year of Saturday afternoons. These were from the Spanish American War through Vietnam.
The Vietnam vet had fallen out of a helicopter and then later played a game with a pool cue up his nose and got bumped by a "friend" and it went up into his brain. He did have various cognitive problems because of this injury.
None of these vets in the long term care section of the hospital seemed to want to talk about their war experiences that I can recall.
A number of them passed during that year of Saturdays unfortunately but these were for the most part those who were pretty much confined to their rooms because of their medical conditions.