Alright, in honor of V-E day, I've got a World War II story.

When I was eleven, I was a World War II buff. No, scratch that, I was a gigantic World War II dork. /1

I had a coffee-table book of Medal of Honor recipients that I pored over. I checked out the book versions of Ollie North's war stories from the library every other week and watched the DVDs in the pocket multiple times. /2

My idea of an awesome birthday present was John Wayne's Sands of Iwo Jima on DVD. I'm pretty sure I was writing Sands of Iwo Jima fan fiction in my head before I knew what fan fiction was.

I was a dork. Then again, I was homeschooled. /3

I really loved Ollie North's interviewing style with war veterans. In fact, in hindsight it was probably watching Ollie North that gave me my first taste of what good journalism should look like. So I decided to play Ollie North. With my neighbor. /4

Jim and his wife had lived in the house nextdoor for decades before we moved in. They delighted to watch me grow up and would often hang out across the fence while I used our swingset and entertained them with Julie Andrews covers. (We've established that I was homeschooled.) /5

What I hadn't known was that Jim was a veteran of the European theater. Needless to say, when my dad told me this, 11-year-old me was in awe. So I grabbed a tape recorder and a blank cassette and marched next door to collect his memories. Just like Ollie North. /6

I wound up filling three tapes' worth of those memories. Things he had never shared with his kids. Things I don't even know if he had shared with his wife. In all our interviews, he never once talked down to me. When it became too much, he would ask me to pause, and I would. /7

He remembered his father listening to Pearl Harbor on the radio and saying "Jimmy, come down quick! Jimmy, come down quick!" He remembered signing up, getting tested, coming home and telling his then girlfriend, "You've got an A1 man." He remembered how she cried. /8

He served on multiple fronts, including Africa vs. Rommel. (He still respected Rommel, he said.) Letters home were heavily censored, so he would encode his location at any given time into the first letters of each new line. "All is well...For a little while..." /9

He flew as a reconnaissance pilot and listened to Bing Crosby in the cockpit, trying not to cry. /10

In Italy, he saw the hanging dead corpse of Mussolini and received a blessing from the pope. His two Catholic buddies had chipped in to buy him a rosary and stood on either side as the pope came through, blessing every other guy. He got Jim, missed them. They were furious. /11

He told me dark stories about friends who couldn't handle it. A friend whose girl didn't wait for him. A friend who woke up the guys one night wildly waving his gun. Jim tackled him before he used it on anyone, or on himself. /12

Jim only ever stopped one bullet. It ricocheted off a pocket Bible. He found it and kept it. /13

He suffered severe back injuries that ultimately became too debilitating for him to continue, so he spent the last days of the war in recuperation at a Mediterranean R & R spot. /14

He came home and married his girl. They had children and grandchildren, and unless I misremember they lived to see a great-grandchild. /15

To this day, I still recall a moment from early in the tapes, when he was remembering what it was like to sail out for deployment, past the Statue of Liberty. The memory overwhelmed him. "Sometimes I...I get a little..." He paused. "Turn it off for a minute." /16

Other things are coming back to me as I thread this. Things that made me laugh out loud, like when he said "There were no girls in this war. We did have WACs and WAVEs, but, well, they WACed and they WAVEd." /17

Jim outlived his wife. I was well into high school when he passed away. When we visited him, he was physically weak but mentally still there. We brought him a book about Ronald Reagan. "He was a great president. A great president." /18

I remember when we left that visit my dad saying "There will be things in your life that you regret. Visiting Jim today will not be one of them."

He was right. /19

I still have the tapes, now digitized. His kids have copies. His grandkids will get copies, I'm sure. Sometimes I have an irrational fear of losing the files. But I have them. /20

Jim was a humble man, but he was proud of what he did. He knew he was a good soldier. "They call us the Greatest Generation," he said, picking up his copy of the book by that name. "And you know, I think we were."

I think so, too. /End

@James1940