My father grew up in Dallas, around 12th Avenue, which was a tough bit of ground, and he did a lot of street fighting.
His dream was to be a farmer and in his pre teens he would ride a bicycle 110 miles to his uncles farm and work there until his father would eventually take him back to Dallas.
He didn't talk a lot about himself but over the years you could put a bit of a picture together. I'm not sure when they got into airplanes but the uncle spent the rest of his life (after WWII) working on them.
My father joined the army and was placed in the Army Air Corp, where he spent the duration of his service as a pilot trainer, although he rarely ever mentioned it.
Most who were in the thickest battles came home and rarely ever discussed it, they had seen far too much death up close to wish to discuss it.
My father was the same way tho he never set foot on a foreign shore.
I spent most of my life rambling and doing whatever came along, but don't think it wasn't interesting, I was in a 8000 ft. gold mine in South Dakota and in Oilfields in the Gulf of Mexico, and a bit of anything in between. As you fly into and out of DFW Airport you can see at least 6 of the high rise office buildings I drew and helped design there.
In my entire life my father never told me as much about his past as I put about mine in that one paragraph.
He did tell my brother in law about sitting in the cockpit of a B-17 on the tarmac waiting for a slot for him to take up some more pilot trainees when they heard it coming in over the radio that Japan had surrendered.
From that I finally gathered why, after seeing a newsreel at an air base of some coffins lined along the tarmac, which is basically any part of an airport that isn't runway, why he never spoke of it.
The runways then were full of planes taking off bound for overseas laden with soldiers and bombs, which would soon be returning laden with coffins, which would be lain along the tarmac as they waited to be shipped to their homes, as the planes they came in on left again, laden with soldiers and bombs.
My father saw as much death sitting right there on that tarmac as anybody saw in those battlefields, and had the same reason for not wanting to discuss it.
There are so many things I may never know about him, but I do know and firmly believe they were the Greatest Generation