What would you write to your mom if you thought it was your last letter?

What would you write if you had to do it again?  2cents remembers his father in 1944.

Growing up in the 1960s meant that we were crazy about spacemen and WWII G.I.s - Rat Patrol was one of my favorite shows, back around 1966.  That was only 20 years after the end of that conflagration, so it was fresh in everyone's minds.  My fifth grade teacher was a Marine who fought his way across the pacific (yeah, we behaved ourselves, duh).

And so it was a shock that I never knew that 2cent's Dad was a veteran of Normandy, and the Bulge.  He never talked about it, until the late 1990s.  He told me that he had wanted to put it behind him at the time, that life was busy with career and family, making a life.

We would have hung on every word, because we were immersed in the war retrospectives.  He wasn't interested, and the few stories he did relate (like diving into a drainage ditch when they came under artillery bombardment, only to find that he was sharing the ditch with a half decomposed corpse) was enough to understand why.

Greatest Generation was no joke: no literary agents, just a can of whoop-ass for the Nazis, and then home to marry and raise kids.  He was a good man, and I'm better for having known him.