My wife's uncle was killed fighting Nazis in the very last days of World War II.
His family was celebrating Victory Europe when they got the news. They never really recovered from that.
His body is buried at Arlington.
My wife and kids and I have visited his grave.
I'm some kind of pacifist, as was one of my grandfathers. My other grandfather was an Army Air Corp officer during World War II. He never talked about that. Apparently he had a big black car with an enlisted driver and carried a "get out of jail free card" for misfit (some homosexual) brilliant people deemed essential to the war effort. During the war he mysteriously acquired a knack for exotic metals and was later an engineer for the Apollo Project. All this because he was too much of a klutz to fly. That was his dream to fly but nobody ever trusted him at the controls of an airplane. I saw him ride a bicycle once and it was terrifying. Grandpa is going to die!
My grandpa was a racist and he thought homosexuality was some kind of disorder. But he never embraced any kind of hate, not even the "love the sinner, hate the sin sort." Maybe as an engineer he realized life is a messy business, he could only work with what he got. Not perfect, but he could have been worse. Much worse. He called my wife a "Mexican Girl" and boycotted our wedding, but he got over it. Maybe because she could do the math better than him.
My dad and my wife's dad volunteered for military service during the Korean conflict. My wife's dad was a Navy hospital corpsman assigned to the Marines, my dad was a nearsighted "Radar O'Reilly" Army medical clerk. It was just the luck of the draw they never landed in Korea. Neither one of them likes guns.
My wife's dad got to be a guinea pig and witness a nuclear bomb test up close. They marched off towards ground zero, stuff burning all around them, as the mushroom cloud was still rising in the sky. And they were all sworn to secrecy until Bill Clinton released them from that oath. A lot of those guys died prematurely from exposure to fallout. My father-in-law is still with us.
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He was a member of the press by then, and so was at a so-called "safe" distance. He even took a few photos:
He was 35 at the time, and didn't get his first case of cancer until age 70 (prostate--beat that) and the one that killed him at age 78. Very few beat pancreatic cancer, and he wasn't one of them. His other two siblings died of cancer, too, and none of them were anywhere an A-bomb, so we don't think it had any lingering effects on him. But there is always the doubt.
My wife's mom lost three brothers during World War II, one of them killed less than 5 miles from their home as he was retreating to try and wait out the inevitable surrender. Her dad was already home as a cripple, having come home from Stalingrad at age 19 minus a leg. His most fervent wish was for all his children to be girls so that none of them would ever be subjected to involuntary military service as he was. This was a wish fate was to grant him.
