Advice from Old PeopleSometimes, just sometimes, old people say something worth listening to. Ok, so it's like picking the needle out of a whole haystack of mis-remembered war stories, but those gems should be celebrated.
Tell us something worthwhile an old-type person has told you.
Note, we're leaving the definition of old up to you, you smooth-skinned youngsters.
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chthonic, Thu 19 Jun 2008, 16:16)
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My paternal GrandfatherServed with the Army Air Corps from 1942 until 1968. He ended up working with the Signal Corps for a time, and was a radio presenter for a while on the Armed Forces Radio Network. He gave my parents, among other things, his transcription of General Patton's speech before he went to North Africa - the one that opens the movie "Patton".
He was one of the last wounded in WW2 Pacific campaigns. It turns out that during the initial stages of the US occupation of Japan he was assigned to one of several crews that went out among the Japanese public to show that Americans were not going to eat their babies.
He went to a small mountain village in Hokkaido with his detachment and visited the families there, who were so far behind that they had not heard anything about Hiroshima or the surrender. The one man with a weapon in the village was an old veteran of the Russo-Japanese War, who had a) maintained his service weapon and b) thought my Grandfather's detachment was Russian. He fired two shots, one into the floor and one just above my Grandfather's kneecap, where it lodged in the muscle. He said that the family they were visiting were mortified and managed to wrestle the weapon from their patriarch faster than he and his partners could respond. He said it stung like anything, and when advised that it was because the old man thought he was Russian, he told me, " I said that was fine, I don't like Reds either, and we got drunk together when I got back from the hospital." My parents have a large album of pictures from his time in Japan, and one of them indeed shows him and the old man with some other US soldiers, grinning like idiots and my Grandfather sporting crutches and a bandage over his right leg.
He said that his time in Japan was the best time of his life, and that he never wanted to leave.
I believe this - in his personal effects, after he died, we found a series of pictures of a Japanese lady and a little girl with some plainly hereditary features. When I visit my parents again I'm going to steal that picture, and have my one of my friends translate the letter the pictures accompany. Those images haunt me whenever I think about my grandfather.
Sorry for the length and all that. I have a list of amusing sayings from my elders that I will soon recount.
(, Mon 23 Jun 2008, 3:57, Reply)
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