Ok, so I’m cleaning out my parents’ house and things. Boxes of things that even they had put away and forgotten about. Including some stuff from my grandparents, and I found my grandfather’s service records and photos from WWII. He never really talked about it much - I didn’t know what he did, evacuation kind of unit he was in, or any of that. About all he mentioned over the years was that he genuinely liked the German people the most, he learned to love potato bread, he hated the Red Cross because they tried to charge h for cigarettes immediately post-battle, and when I got an M-1 Carbine, he held it, took a minute, and said he’d carried one of those to Germany. I THINK he did have some ground combat experience, but he was primarily with the 10th Fighter Squadron as an armorer; he worked on P-47s and P-51s. He’s sitting on the wing in the first pic, standing on the right in the second (both taken in France). He’s on the wing of the Mustang in the bottom pic. I presume the snow covered P-47s are around the Battle of the Bulge. His unit crossed the Rhine at Worms (and of course, the obligatory Eiffel Tower pic): The papers are cool, too. He mustered in with a bunch of people from S Texas in 1942. He’s listed as a rancher from Alice, TX. There are some other pics. Including one - just one - of a makeshift morgue, with a shitload of bodies still on the ground, wooden coffins behind them. And then after his European adventure, back to S Texas to work with cattle and the oil patch, like so many others.