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My grandmother grew up down the road from a German POW camp just east of Jackson, MI. She told of a similar situation: prisoner's would be "hired" out to local farmers, some would be on their own. She would wave as the trucks they were traveling in went past. They were definitely happy to be in Michigan rather than Germany (not that the landscape is much different). More than a few returned to the area after the war. Quoted:
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There was a POW camp not far from where I grew up, and my parents still live. I was always told how the German boys could basically come and go during the daytime, as long as they were back by roll call. People that lived nearby would hire the boys for oddjobs and such, they would make a little money and even go see a movie. These Germans, like the ones mentioned in posts above, were tired of fighting, tired of starving. They knew they had a better chance of surviving as a POW than as a combatant. |
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In the early months of 1942, a man cooked up the idea to train dogs to only attack people of Japanese ancestry, and then use them in the Pacific theatre. He got several million dollars allocated and they set up a whole island with hundred of kennels, some Nisei volunteers to act as attackees, and set to work. It was an utter failure; the dogs persisted in attacking people without regards to ethnicity.
The island it was on was named Cat Island, MS. 
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Got a few from my grandmother - and she was a civilian.
She told me about her class at school waving the troops off to the Great War, as they marched out of the local barracks past the school. One of the soldiers broke rank to give her a sweetheart souvenir (a handkerchief) - even though she was a young girl & he was a serving soldier. He survived the war, being gassed in the trenches & also spending time as a PoW in Germany. A few years after his return they were married. She was lucky herself to survive WW1 as the house she was in was bombed in Zeppelin raids. Not content with this lack of success, she was also bombed in WW2 as well; a wardrobe falling over the bed stopped her being killed by flying glass. Her son (my uncle) has lived since 1942 or so with the results of travelling home from school during an air raid. A bomb landed close, but outside shrapnel/blast radius. It was however close enough for the flash to burn out his retina = instant loss of sight from then on in that eye. Never stopped him serving in the army in the 50's or being one of the best woodworkers out there. Grandad was most annoyed with WW2 breaking out - as he'd not long spent a lot of money on a new TV set - and outbreak of war meant no more TV service from the BBC for the duration. They had a lot of funny stories about the war - like being accused of signalling U-Boats. Two young children in the house, not really aware of the real danger posed, were doing what children do, and messing around in the kitchen. Being near the coast, a lot of care was taken to monitor the blackout. It turned out that a wool blanket in a door frame was only a partially successful means of blocking light....and quite poor if said small folk were racing in & out of the house like idiots. A local ARP post monitored the "morse code" that resulted, with the Police being sent to investigate, as they took the flashing as an attempt to signal U-Boats!! They also had a "guest" in the war. A Norwegian sailor - Haftan Jensen, plus his son. They'd been stranded outside of Norway by the German invasion. The benefits of said guests were sometimes not too obvious; but one was when the free sale of un-rationed whale meat was seen as a solution to the problem of lack of protein in the diet. Whale meat when correctly prepared is supposed to be as good as the best steak you'll ever eat...the problem is the official methodology was totally inadequate. The Norwegians told them how to prepare the meat...so they were one of the few families to benefit from this addition to the diet. The Jensen family back home in Norway had a busy war. Mrs Jensen, it seems, used to invite all the local German officers back to her house for tea/cakes & to listen to music, etc.. The town hated her with a passion as she was seen as a big time collaborator. One of the local Norwegian Nazi party officials paid her a visit one day, demanding a large cash payment. She shot him dead. Seems that the spot on the lawn where she entertained the Germans was the very place where the Norwegian resistance arms dump was buried, and this local Nazi had found out her secret. After the war she was given a medal from the King on his return to Norway. Another relative was a young lad. Being too young for the army he was in the Home Guard. Being a young lad he was not too keen on following orders to the letter and got into trouble on a night exercise, as he decided the route he was told to follow was not as good as one he had in mind. He ended up back at base with his mate for a couple of hours to spare while everyone else was out in ambush positions as not everyone had been captured!! He was later Court Martialled & kicked out for falling asleep at his guard post. His older brother was blown out of the sky over Holland on an RAF bombing run...something he never really got over & I only heard him talk about it once when I was about to go off to RAF basic training. ETA: A classmate of my grandmother had a notorious war, with a couple of movies being made about his escapades. He was a famous spy, for the Germans! Agent Zig Zag...actually a double agent, working for British Intelligence. @p2tharizo Ken who? I knew a lot of the 505PIR guys, happy times drinking beer with them in StMereEglise. OB Hill, Howard Manion, Bob Murphy, etc. |
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All I've got is that I loved reading these as a kid:
Wierd War Tales Comic Books |
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Friend of mine was in Gulf War I. As they approached the Kuwaiti border a guy dressed in Hawaiian Shorts, a T Shirt and flip flops jumps out of a foxhole and comes running at them waiving his arms wildly and screaming something..... They think he could be a suicide bomber etc.....They lay down a line of automatic fire in the sand in front of him and the guy hits the deck. As they cautiously approach the guy keeps saying in perfect American English- "Where the hell have you guys been?" "Thank God, You're finally here" "I've been waiting in that fucking hole for a month now"... etc.... Turns out the poor bastard was a Medical Student at the University of Chicago. He has gone home to see his family in Iraq and got press ganged into the military off the street...He had been sitting in the foxhole out in the middle of nowhere with a rifle, couple bottles of water, some tins of food etc...for a long time! |
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My grandmother lived through WW2 as a German, near the Eastern front, and she's slowly started sharing her stories with me. She was young at the time, but her memories are still with her. She lived in Silesia, in an area about an hour from Breslau. Her father (my great grandfather) was a Luftwaffe officer (who I have been waiting almost a year to get the records on from DD-WASt in Germany). Her brothers were also a mix of Luftwaffe / Wehrmacht. No matter what people in this forum might think, not everyone in the German military was an ardent Nazi. Military service had been a large part of tradition in Germany and Prussia. One story that I always remember her telling me was when they had to evacuate from her town in Silesia. The Russians were within 5km of their town and the German Army was falling back, telling all Germans to leave the area. She got on a train with her family and remembers how it took them a long time to make any substantial distance - They had to travel at night, as they were routinely strafed during the day from the Russians. Her memories are vivid to say the least... Anyways, they were set to meet up with the rest of the family further west into Germany. On the night they were supposed to make it into the city to meet up their incoming train was late, and they missed their train connection. The next morning they got on their train, and made it to the outskirts of city and could go no further. That city was Dresden, and it was the day after the bombing that destroyed the city... She was supposed to be there, that night with family. Her father thought she and her mother were there that night, and he didn't find out for months that they in fact missed the train and were still alive. Of course, that's the short version of it all. She remembers everything else about that day they got into town, also everything about the ending days of the war. For me, its unbelievably mesmerizing stuff - there's not many people alive who have stories about what it was like to be on the German side on the Eastern front in the closing days of the war. Fewer even seem to be interested in how the Germans fought against the Russians, and how the Russians treated civilians on their march westward. To this day, she still won't travel east to Silesia, and still hasn't returned. A lot of it looks the same as it was back then from the photos I've shown her. She says its just too much for her. |
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As some of the above posters pointed out, WWII prisoners were kept all over the US and Canada. In NW Ontario on Lake of the Woods there was a German POW camp located away from any roads to deter escape attempts. The prisoners could get work with the local pulp mill cutting cord wood and would do that full time. The best story from that camp, according to the historical society, was the time the guards took a few prisoners into Kenora for supplies. The guards got so drunk the prisoners had to carry them back to the boat and deliver them back to the camp with the supplies. It really didn't sound like most German prisoners were that unhappy about their circumstances. The historical society did note that there were a couple of instances where German agitators in the camps were killed by other prisoners. |
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Back in the 1960's, my father's boss had been an NCO in Germany as WW2 came to a close. He and buddy were in a jeep, when they turned a corner to find themselves staring straight at a German bunker complex bristling with machine guns. His driver yanked the wheel, overturning their jeep in the ditch, breaking the driver's leg, and losing both of their rifles.
He was laying there in the ditch, gripping the only weapon he could find, his bayonet; thinking that a German squad would come shoot them at any minute. After a short time he heard a voice calling: "Mr. American... Mr. American... We surrender!" He peeked at the bunker, and sure enough, there was a white flag waving. The Germans manning the position were all old men and young boys, waiting for the first American they could surrender to. They splinted his driver's leg, made a stretcher, and he marched all thirty or forty something of his prisoners back towards the advancing Americans behind a white flag, with their rifles slug muzzle down. And that is how to capture a platoon of enemy combatants when armed with nothing but a bayonet. |
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My dad coming home from WWII on the QE, I think, and everybody had war souvenirs. An announcement came over the speaker for everyone to turn them in to the officers. He claimed the ship raised up in the water as troops tossed the loot overboard. That isn't all that weird, so the only two sort of weird, but probably more unique and cool that he told were: Crossing the English Channel a few days after D-day. He was getting a hard time from his buddies because he had his life jacket on, when the ship behind them suddenly blew up, presumably from a German u-boat torpedo. He said he hadn't seen those guys move that fast trying to find life jackets! He also tells of a family that befriended he and some of his buddies in France. Once their town had been liberated they invited them over for dinner and the father of the family moved a large piece of furniture away from the wall, and pulled out a bottle of champagne from a hiding spot behind it. He proceeded to open it and toast my grandfather and his buddies for liberating them from the Germans. My grandpa wrote in his memoirs that the irony in it was that his guys did nothing at all to liberate the town as they came in many days after the main force (engineering company), and my grandpa was about as German as the German soldiers that had occupied the town (3rd generation immigrant). |
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Yank Magazine had some interesting tidbits of information in its latter WW 2 issues.
One such goodie was about one man that served in World War I. When he was discharged he turned in his rifle and got out. Fast Forward to about 1941 and the man re-enlists. He was issued his old rifle. The serial numbers he memorized back in 1918 matched the rifle he was just issued. |
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Iraqi dude that was carrying his brothers head in a box. Pretty sure it was his brothers, not sure.
Another Iraqi dude that was volunteering his blood to help his very obviously dead friend. Good thought, but shit don't work that way man. Dude in my unit that took a couple rounds in his chest plate and rifle, then continued mission with an AK. ETA: a friend of mine got shot the fuck up by a 25th ID crew chief. That was pretty fucking  Fucking stupid asshole.
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As some of the above posters pointed out, WWII prisoners were kept all over the US and Canada. In NW Ontario on Lake of the Woods there was a German POW camp located away from any roads to deter escape attempts. The prisoners could get work with the local pulp mill cutting cord wood and would do that full time. The best story from that camp, according to the historical society, was the time the guards took a few prisoners into Kenora for supplies. The guards got so drunk the prisoners had to carry them back to the boat and deliver them back to the camp with the supplies. It really didn't sound like most German prisoners were that unhappy about their circumstances. The historical society did note that there were a couple of instances where German agitators in the camps were killed by other prisoners. There are many reports on them being much better fed and clothed as prisoners for the US than when they were fighting as conscripts. |
| We had a Marine with some kind of medical condition that made him involuntarily twitch at random times. A buddy of mine said the first time he met this Marine was while riding in a 5 ton in Desert Storm. My buddy did not know about the other guys involuntary twitching. They were riding along one day and my buddy was driving. Well the involuntary twitching happened and my buddy quickly stop the truck and threw on his gas mask! He thought they were under a chemical attack. Lol |
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This one's more odd or even just humorous but I've waited a long time to tell it to someone.
Background: In Viet Nam there's a bird that makes a screech which sounds almost like it's saying RE-UP (called the Reup bird by grunts; slang for re-enlist) and a lizard that makes a truly weird noise which sounds somewhat like it's saying fuckyou (guess what it's called). In the bush at night on ambush, with the bugs, snakes, and various other unpleasant things, soaked by the rain, and waitin' for charlie to come try to kill you, occasionally a reup bird would screech followed by a fuckyou lizard call and there was hardly a man there that didn't chuckle. |
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Friend of mine was in Gulf War I. As they approached the Kuwaiti border a guy dressed in Hawaiian Shorts, a T Shirt and flip flops jumps out of a foxhole and comes running at them waiving his arms wildly and screaming something..... They think he could be a suicide bomber etc.....They lay down a line of automatic fire in the sand in front of him and the guy hits the deck. As they cautiously approach the guy keeps saying in perfect American English- "Where the hell have you guys been?" "Thank God, You're finally here" "I've been waiting in that fucking hole for a month now"... etc.... Turns out the poor bastard was a Medical Student at the University of Chicago. He has gone home to see his family in Iraq and got press ganged into the military off the street...He had been sitting in the foxhole out in the middle of nowhere with a rifle, couple bottles of water, some tins of food etc...for a long time! |
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My hometown in rural OK has a football stadium that was formerly a WWII POW camp, with a brick wall around the perimeter and guard station at the front gate. The wall isn't all that tall, and is pretty easily jumpable, and would be a quick up and over job even with barbed wire. I've always heard they didn't really worry about POW escapes as none of them really cared to try. They didn't really have anywhere to escape to, and life as an American POW was better than pretty much any other alternative. Quoted:
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There was a POW camp not far from where I grew up, and my parents still live. I was always told how the German boys could basically come and go during the daytime, as long as they were back by roll call. People that lived nearby would hire the boys for oddjobs and such, they would make a little money and even go see a movie. These Germans, like the ones mentioned in posts above, were tired of fighting, tired of starving. They knew they had a better chance of surviving as a POW than as a combatant. |
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I ran across a memorable World War II after action report from the National Archives a little while back that related a rather humorous interaction between an enlisted man and a general.
Apparently, during some heavy ground fighting in Germany, American troops had a bridge wired to explode should Germans threaten to overtake it. A sergeant had his hand on the trigger some distance away while a firefight raged over the bridge. According to the report, the division commander approached the sergeant and watched the action for a few moments. Alarmed at what he thought was a German unit swarming over the bridge, he told the sergeant to trigger the explosives. The sergeant protested, saying, “Sir, those are our men that you see.” The general again told him to blow the bridge. The sergeant refused, insisting that American troops were there. The general turned to the sergeant and with a booming voice ordered the him to ignite the explosives. The sergeant snarled, “Sir, you can go fuck yourself. I’m not blowing it.” The response stunned the general, and he turned and walked to his Jeep and sped away. The after action report was typed, but some concerned officer had penciled in a slight alteration, crossing out “go fuck yourself” and writing in the margin above it “go jump in a lake.” |
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The Germans fought side by side with U.S. troops in WWII, once. Not many people know that. Battle for Castle Itter Over beers two nights ago, he told me he spent four years at University in Italy after the war on the Armies dime. I never knew this. He also told me that our collusion with China directly after WW2 was the beginning of the end for the US. Not that he knew that then. He's 94, nearly completely deaf and half blind, but completely cognizant. Same with grandma who built P 38s in Burbank. |
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One of my 1SG was a tunnel rat in Vietnam. He had a Silver Star for capturing over 40 NVA in a tunnel.
I asked him how it happened and he said, “Sheer fucking luck” and told me the story. He entered a tunnel near where the tunnel opened into a large room. He only saw one person in the room so with his 1911 aimed at him, ordered him out of the tunnel. He backed down the tunnel until he got to the exit and pulled the guy out. Then another set of hands poked up from the tunnel, so they pulled him out. Then another. And another. And they kept on coming. There were 42 people down there but he didn’t see them because it was so dark. They all followed the first guy out and he got credit for capturing all of them. |
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My grandma was a nurse on a hospital ship during WWII in the Atlantic
She said the ships always made turns to avoid U-Boats,but this one day it turned very hard where the crew had to hold on more than usual She runs up on the deck and see that they just missed a German mine,it was a smaller boat so if they had hit it,i probably wouldnt be typing this |
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I talked to older gentleman when I was a young kid and his story I’ve remembered over the years. He talked of boot camp and how the army would always tell them how great their weapons were and from the M1’s to the 30 cal browning’s were the best money could buy. He said they all believe that then. He said all that thought changed when he was landing on Omaha beach. He said our machine guns went rat-a-tat-rat-a-tat he said the Germans opened up with MG-42’s, in his words he said it sounded like you tore a sheet. About all i can remember after that was he said it scared the hell out of him. |
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One of our line company squads was riding in an older 7 ton and got ambushed by small arms fire/RPGs. It was 2006 Iraq with the older covered 7 tons but with the wide open window frames above the side plate armor.
One of the initial RPG rounds went through a window in the 7 ton and out the other side....right over everyone's seated heads. Everyone had their rucks attached to the open window frames and it missed everything. At first I thought it was total BS but others confirmed it later. The ambush was from an elevated position so luckily the shot was at the perfect angle to pass right through. Can't even imagine how many shots it would take to replicate that. EDIT: Similar to this style. Same setup with the packs/larger open windows. 
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| My Marine grandpa was in WWII, landed on Okinawa. He always mentioned that he didn't get a single fresh vegetable for over a year, my grandma would then chime in that right after he got back from the war he would sit down and eat a whole head of lettuce, green bell peppers, onions, tomatoes, raw ears of corn, okra, etc, whatever he could get fresh. Until the year he died he always had huge gardens planted almost year round in FL and always carried a salt shaker in his shirt pocket, he'd walk out there and eat vegetables fresh right off the plants everyday. |
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I almost had the second drone/manned aircraft midair collision (that I know of) in Afghanistan due to an idiot MI-8 pilot
Once I was running a drone out to do a BDA on the Paki border when I caught something out of the corner of my eye. I told my PO to go back and zoom in on it. It was an Apache, just sitting at my altitude about half mile away, just turning and staring at us as we went by. That view is not something I'd like to experience in person. All of us were a little creeped out and wondering if he knew we were friendly
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The Germans fought side by side with U.S. troops in WWII, once. Not many people know that. Battle for Castle Itter |
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When my wife and I lived in Reston, VA back in the 1970s, our nextdoor neighbor was a German lady about 60 years old. in 1978, her older brother from Germany came to visit, and we were invited to dinner to meet her brother, Karl Berndt.
During dinner, I asked him if he was a "feldgrau" (Germen for GI). He replied that he was, and that he served in France, Russia, and Italy. He was captured by the US Army about a week before the war ended, and on May 7th was being interviewed by a US Army interrogator. The American asked him where he was from, and Berndt told him he was from Munich. The American said that he had studied in Munich before the war, and that he had dated a German girl with the same last name. The girl's name was Pia Berndt. Karl said "Mein Gott! Pia is my sister!" Two days later, on May 9th. Karl Berndt was again called in to the interrogator's office. He was given discharge papers, and told that he was free to go. He had been captured in the north of Italy, and walked most of the way home to Munich. He said that he got beat up a couple of times, and twice he was given a ride by GIs. It took him 6 weeks to get home, but he made it. He said that everything was in ruins, and for 6 months the only clothes he had was his uniform. He was a really nice guy. He died in 1986. |
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A friend of the family was a 19 year old Coxswain aboard the USS Curtis anchored in Pearl Harbor on Dec, 7, 1941. the night before the raid he and a buddy decided to switch duty stations for a few days. His friend was killed at his duty station during the raid. He went on to serve on fast carriers for the duration of the war, and knew George Gay [called him a nervous fellow]
Ray told me he went through the entire war without so much as a scratch....he finally made it home after the war..got off the carrier in San Francisco...and got mugged. |
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The story that was passed down from my great-great-grandmother...
When word came that Union troops were coming around, she would always bury her salted meet they had in storage. The troops would never believe that she had nothing for them to take, so she left some hanging; although that was tainted with a laxative like poison. I also have another relative who was wounded and captured in Alabama, rehabbed and escaped, and was wounded and captured again in Vicksburg. He survived the war. |
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Not really a war story or all that interesting really but when my grandpa was in Holland with the Royal Electrical Mechanical Engineers he met a Dutch girl and became "friends," at least that was what he told his grand kids. He gave her ration tins and other items that they needed as they had very little after the occupation and we're almost starving. One day when he went to meet her she told him her family had a surprise for him. They didn't have much but they scraped together what they had to get him a real treat: canned eels. They insisted he eat some right away. He told me he tried his best to smile without throwing up while this hungry family insisted he eat their favourite food. Before that on D Day he was in his landing craft a few hundred meters off of Juno beach when they announced that no support troops would be landing as the beach was too conjested. Him and another soldier did not want to miss the largest sea borne invasion in history so they swam in, touched the beach, and swan back. When they landed on June 7 an armored car next to them had its turret sealed with wax to waterproof and when it came ashore they blew the wax out with a small explosive charge. My grandpa and his buddies had no idea what it was and hit the deck. Later he was bombed for real. Not super weird but those are the stories I have. |
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Some random stories from my family:
My uncle (my Mom's BIL) was on a destroyer during the war in the Pacific. He was in the engineering spaces. The captain ordered some radical turns, then sounded the collision alarm. From inside the ship, he heard a torpedo passing under the keel! Sort of a screeching sound, with a down-Doppler effect. The captain had ordered his ship to intercept a Japanese torpedo aimed at one of the capital ships, but it ran too deep to hit the destroyer. *** My Dad had been assigned to radioman-gunner school in the Army Air Corps. He was training for a position in a large bomber, B-24 or B-17. However, at the time of this story he was on hospital orders for some infection in his thumb. So he was living and training with his unit, but actually "belonged" to the hospital. One day his squadron was called to the base commander's office. He marched down to the office in formation with them but had to wait outside. They went inside, dressed in their cadet uniforms.. and came out, shirts untucked and ties untied. They'd been washed out and assigned to the Infantry, for replacements to the German fighting sometime around the Battle of the Bulge. They shipped out and he never saw any of them again. *** He ended up serving in a MP unit on Guam, just after the war*. The Guamanian women generally were good seamstresses, and if you could get them a parachute--which then were made out of silk-- they would make nice clothing for themselves, and Dad negotiated a nice dress for Mom for his trouble. Trouble is, parachutes were not that easy to obtain, and even the ones which were being discarded were stored in secure locations. So he swiped a parachute, and decided to open it before he got it back to his tent. That parachute came out of the pack and got all over the place! If he'd been caught he'd have possibly faced court-martial. *He was on a troop train, heading to a ship to take him overseas, when he heard about the bombing of Hiroshima. One of his saddest moments happened when he had to guard a crash site. A transport had taken off and suffered an engine failure. It bellied in and burned. Dad had to guard the crash site. He remembered seeing the barracks bags of the dead soldiers, in the hold of the burned-up airplane, lined up as if they'd been stacked there. I only saw my dad cry twice: once when his mother died, and once when we visited the Treaty Deck of the USS Missouri. *** Mom told me of a cousin who'd been killed by friendly fire, flying over the Burma hump; it seems that they'd changed the IFF codes after his aircraft had taken off. They couldn't ID themselves so they got shot down. She'd grow very sad when she talked about the war; seems that several of her boyfriends had never returned. |
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That would make a good movie. Quoted:
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The Germans fought side by side with U.S. troops in WWII, once. Not many people know that. Battle for Castle Itter 
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@Manic_Moran does a lot of military archive research for his job, bet he has some good stories However, two which are interesting: Irish prison camps. Allowed out on day passes. Germans and British in the same camp. Irish Neutrality Canadian Army's Stalingrad: Ortona. The defenses How the Canadians dealt with them. |
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Something I've always found odd, but my memory is spotty so a grain of salt on this. In 'Currahee!' (or 'As the Eagles Screamed') Donald R. Burgett has a few first hand accounts that have stuck with me from reading his books. It really is a great trilogy of books IMO. Can be found pretty cheap on Amazon used.
-He had or knew of a Chaplain that fell from a C-47 in training from thousands of feet with a failed chute to survive with only minor injuries. Basically a 'he still had stuff to do' thought on it. Went through training, etc. Going into D-Day drops, they were a lot lower and his chute failed again. Full speed into a hedgerow and turned into confetti. (Paraphrasing) -Sergeant that took a lot of the 'little white pills' they were given. Last they saw of him, he was on horseback almost cut in half by a machine gun, charging a nest with his sidearm. -Raiding a German payroll train and only grabbing a few D-Marks because they'd be worthless while the other guys stuffed their pockets. A 'damnit' moment in hindsight I guess. |
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2005 Iraq, I am on a 4 man sniper mission to get some turds that had been harassing our base with mortars. We are on the roof of an abandoned building with holes drilled/chipped into the outer walls to observe suspected areas. There is abandoned buildings to either side of the one we are using. There was a curfew in effect at night, no civilians were allowed out of their homes/yards.
We begin hearing noises in the building next to ours in the middle of the night. We check on the radio to confirm there are no friendlies in the area. The LT PL is one of the 4 guys on the roof. He decides to throw a frag grenade into the neighboring building were the noise is coming from. Boom, the grenade detonates followed by Arrgh, Arrgh, Arrgh. We had blown up a dog with her pups. A little later, same LT. We were guarding election booths that are being set up. It is at night again and there is still a curfew in effect. The LT sees a man a block away and yells at him to stop. The dude darts behind a corner of a building. LT yells for a Squad to follow him and takes of running toward the building corner. He is using night vision and has target fixation on the suspects last location. He charges hard forward and falls right into a brick lined sewer trench in the middle of the road lanes. The ditch has been filled with concertina wire to prevent insurgents from using it to sneak up on us. The nods get shoved into his face and give him a large black eye. The wire tore up his uniform pretty good and had nasties covering it. We were on a small base and had to wash our laundry by hand. He ended up burning that set of uniforms. |
| My dad flew Scouts (OH-6) in Vietnam. He worked a lot with a FAC in their AO. He found an NVA bunker and had the FAC call in an airstrike on it. He would always fly in afterwards and do a quick BDA. On this occasion he found a crater in the gray mud with a guy standing like a statue in the dead center of it. He said it was so weird he didn't shoot the guy, just flew on. He was probably pulp inside and dead on his feet anyway. |
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I know a guy (lives in TN now) who told me the same story. Marine. Wonder if it was the same guy? Quoted:
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Friend of mine was in Gulf War I. As they approached the Kuwaiti border a guy dressed in Hawaiian Shorts, a T Shirt and flip flops jumps out of a foxhole and comes running at them waiving his arms wildly and screaming something..... They think he could be a suicide bomber etc.....They lay down a line of automatic fire in the sand in front of him and the guy hits the deck. As they cautiously approach the guy keeps saying in perfect American English- "Where the hell have you guys been?" "Thank God, You're finally here" "I've been waiting in that fucking hole for a month now"... etc.... Turns out the poor bastard was a Medical Student at the University of Chicago. He has gone home to see his family in Iraq and got press ganged into the military off the street...He had been sitting in the foxhole out in the middle of nowhere with a rifle, couple bottles of water, some tins of food etc...for a long time!
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Quoted: At the end of the war a lot of them didn’t want to go home, but through whatever laws were in effect we had to send them back. Quite a few made their way back to the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_G%C3%A4rtner |
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Quoted:
I ran across a memorable World War II after action report from the National Archives a little while back that related a rather humorous interaction between an enlisted man and a general. Apparently, during some heavy ground fighting in Germany, American troops had a bridge wired to explode should Germans threaten to overtake it. A sergeant had his hand on the trigger some distance away while a firefight raged over the bridge. According to the report, the division commander approached the sergeant and watched the action for a few moments. Alarmed at what he thought was a German unit swarming over the bridge, he told the sergeant to trigger the explosives. The sergeant protested, saying, “Sir, those are our men that you see.” The general again told him to blow the bridge. The sergeant refused, insisting that American troops were there. The general turned to the sergeant and with a booming voice ordered the him to ignite the explosives. The sergeant snarled, “Sir, you can go fuck yourself. I’m not blowing it.” The response stunned the general, and he turned and walked to his Jeep and sped away. The after action report was typed, but some concerned officer had penciled in a slight alteration, crossing out “go fuck yourself” and writing in the margin above it “go jump in a lake.” You can make a soldier out of a civilian, but you can't take the civilian out of the soldier. Since the American Revoltuion the American soldier has always been an independent thinker. Von Steuben remarked that in an European army, you gave an order and it was obeyed. In the American Army, you had to explain the reasoning for the order before giving the order. This is why we succeed too. Take out the Capt, the Lt takes over. Take out the Lt, the senior sergeant (SMG/FSG/MSG or what not) takes over down to corporal and even senior private. |
| Ali Al Salem, Kuwait, 1991. Iraqi’s had just been pushed out when I came through the base, UXOs everywhere with CEMs still exploding randomly. I saw a Mosque and decided to take a quick looksee. Damn if they hadn’t taken a crap on every available square inch of that mosque floor. Graffiti on the walls and that mosque was just plain savaged. What kind of person craps all over their holy place? Writes graffiti on the walls? My first introduction to Muslim hate. Very surreal. |
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My grampa wound up on a hospital ship (malaria and something else) and there were some POWs aboard. One German POW was speaking this really weird, guttural kind of German so my grampa goes up to him and the dude was from TX. He'd been drafted but when they were set to fight American forces he convinced the other German soldiers in his group to surrender and let him do the talking.
There were a few Japanese prisoners as well but angry GIs threw them overboard. |
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I remember reading about a B-17 crew that made it back to base with holes in the wing and fuel tank. Crew pulls the tank and finds an unexploded 20mm cannon shell from a German fighter. It has no explosive charge inside, only a note, written in IIRC Hungarian that translated to English "This is all we can do for you now."
All these years, and I was maybe a teenager when I read it, I still remember that story. It wasn't just the GI's with balls, sabotaging German munitions was a sure fire way to a bullet if you got caught. Civies fought the war too, even if it was to ensure an allied bomber crew came home, that crew put warheads on foreheads after coming back because of that one act. |