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I'm a Vietnam-era female citizen who has about 200 close Nam vet pals I've met over the last nine years online and of course IRL all over the place all my life.
Lost my daughter (not to death and not due to combat) to that war, and it changed me forever. Long story, which I've told elsewhere on DU a time or two when it was relevant.
My dad was a WWII vet, Army, Artillery, who fought in North Africa and Italy for two years, two months and twenty-two days and was wounded four days before the war ended in Italy when a German Eighty-Eight shell hit the turret where he was the "sighter." Killed the other two guys in the turret, one of them his best pal who'd had a premonition only a couple of nights before that he wouldn't survive the war even though it was almost over there in Italy. Their group was "just picking up a little rear action," as my dad told it, when they found themselves in a serious situation.
Dad was laced with shrapnel and his hair and clothes were on fire, the ammo in the turret was cooking off, and he followed his training and rolled out of the hatch, down the side of the tank, and then all the way down the berm they were on and into an irrigation ditch alongside it. That put the fire out, but he always asked people when he told this story: "Didja ever try to RUN in two feet of water?"
He managed to get out of the water and headed toward his own guys, under fire from a German machine gun in the second story of an Italian farmhouse (the Eighty-Eight had been concealed in a large haystack nearby) ... and then his own troops drew a bead on him and nearly shot him because they couldn't recognize him as American.
I was, as a result of that family background, raised to be a flag-waving, proud and patriotic American by both my dad and a Rosie-Riveter mom who worked for a time on P-38's before she married my dad. A war marriage, typical of the times, in early 1942.
Now I've had to hugely reduce the number and size of flags I display on my house and car (none on car now, only tiny ones in flowerbed in yard). I'm afraid people will think I support that moran squatting in the White House if I proudly display flags like I'd done all my life before him.
Makes me so mad I want to shove a flagpole somewhere the light don't shine, if you get my drift.
Anyway, that's a part of my story that I felt like telling tonight, after reading your eloquent introduction. I haven't hung out in the Veterans forum yet because I've been in a lot of Nam vets and supporters groups online for years, but I caught your post on the Latest page and just had to reply.
:hi: :patriot: Welcome! So glad you are here and adding your voice to the conversation. IMO folks like yourself speak from a place of a certain authority just by virtue of your life experience in the military. Thanks for serving your country and all of us citizens in it for so long and so well. I hope you didn't lose all your veterans benefits due to that "less than honorable" discharge they hit you with just before you were due to retire!
And I've wondered about what you mentioned -- the possibility of changing one's screen name here in DU. Don't know if it's possible, though I'm not unhappy with my usual handle I use most places.
Be sure to let us know if you get yours changed so we'll know who ya are. Glad yer here and speaking out!
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