My sister was kind enough to send me these photos of Pap and the boys. He was a sergeant in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
On the left, he’s in Europe. He’s third from the front (second from the back) on the right side. It looks like he’s holding a pipe, which makes perfect sense because in the early 70s, one my grandmother’s errands on a Saturday afternoon, when my grandfather was working (six days a week), was to swing by the smoke shop downtown, so that we could pick up some pipe cleaners. While we were there, she let me pick out a comic book. Sometimes, if I was lucky, she’d even take me up the street, not too far from where she’d trade in her Green Stamps, to Hobby Hangout, so that I could buy an Aurora monster model. Even then, I loved the old Universal horror movies.
On the right, it looks as if they’re in the Philippines. My grandfather is seated (or crouching?), front left. They had some close calls in both theaters. I don’t know a lot about what kind of action he saw. I know at the very least people were taking shots at him in the Pacific. In Europe, I already wrote about the time the German plane came down unexpectedly in the middle of the night. His duties, as he described it, involved getting everything ready for troops and transports on their way to battle, from what I gather sometimes also providing makeshift infrastructure for encampments, and then blowing everything up afterwards so that the enemy couldn’t follow. Apologies to Pap if I’m misremembering or getting it wrong.
I don’t know anything about the rest of the boys, but one of them showed up at the viewing to say goodbye, on the eve of my grandfather’s funeral in 1996.
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