[Vigilanteman]

Don’t know about other wars, but my father and most of those in the World War II generation talked very little about their service. Dad served on a landing ship which took dead and wounded out of hot battles like Iwo Jima and Okinawa when it dropped off supplies. Even when I got older and asked him about it, the cost in lives still bothered him, but he did it because it was his duty. The real heros, he said, were those who didn’t come home.

[Army Air Corps]

Don’t know about other wars, but my father and most of those in the World War II generation talked very little about their service.

I had a great uncle (may he rest in peace) who was a Seabee. He would rarely say anything about his service. He did once say that he saw things that he wished he had not.

[cartoonistx]

...most of those in the World War II generation talked very little about their service...

My father, too, spoke sparingly of his service. As I grew up it fell to my maternal grandmother to speak of her son-in-law's bravery to my brother and I... how he earned his two purple hearts and his bronze star...how he was among the first across the bridge at Remagen...many things that we should know. It wasn't until I took him to see Saving Private Ryan that Dad opened up about his service, so moved was he by that film's message...Earn It! He died in 2001 (before he would have had to see America attacked on her soil again, Thank God.) He didn't have time to finish dictating his memoirs.

[newhouse]

most of those that served didn’t talk about it

Did not about WW1 either. The only comment my dad ever said referred to the “butchers” sent to practice on the wounded when I referred to a really good surgeon I worked with later, that had served in Viet Nam. Supposedly Dad’s records were in the fire in was it St Louis back in the late 1970s. So I really only knew what I could see. Which was considerable.