A Soldier Strips the Romance Out of Life at War

"We stayed in Ederen until the morning of the 23rd of February when we were the first company in the regiment to cross the Roer. We had grouped up and advanced a ways when we were ordered to halt because we had encountered a mine field. We were told that there were engineers trying to figure out how to get through it. Mortars began zeroing in on us. I was lying on my left side digging with my entrenching tool trying to get underground when a mortar exploded right beside me. I felt like someone had thrust a red hot poker into my right thigh. I remember screaming with pain. The concussion numbed me and I thought both my legs had been blown off. I frantically reached down and found that I was still in one piece. The one fragment that had hit me had fractured my femur. I was carried back out of mortar range and left alone"

http://carol_fus.tripod.com/army_hero_charles_rose.html

 

More images of what war is really like and what can happen.

Gallery of the horrors of war. Warning - explicit contents
"Although one could easily paint the portrait of tank warfare as that of knights in shining armour, it is important to remember the fate of many a tank crew member who has been killed in a war in which they were only a small piece. Many of the victims died a most horrendous death, and thousands still remain on the battlefields, the family not knowing the fate of a father, brother, husband or son.
The nature of war is grimmer than can be portrayed on any photograph, but the evidence is frightning enough. Only proceed to this photo gallery if you are aware of the graphic facts of the nature of war.
Please verify if you are aware of the nature of war, and wish to preceed"

http://www.panzerworld.net/horrorgallery.html

 

"Pucci's luck ran out when the Allies finally broke out of the Anzio beachhead, and he joined a line of infantry advancing through a ravine -- preferable to being exposed to enemy fire in the wide-open flat terrain, his sergeant said.
The ravine proved to be a deathtrap, however, as German tanks lined the rim, firing at the GIs below. "They shelled the hell out of us," Pucci said. "When I got hit, it was like a Wild West movie, bodies lying all over the place."
Deafened from the blast that hit near him, bleeding profusely from a wounded leg, Pucci alternated between trying to use his own belt for a tourniquet and passing out.
Tossed in a halftrack piled with wounded, Pucci was treated at a succession of aid stations and hospitals -- nearly losing his wounded leg to amputation -- before returning home to recover.
Or at least as recovered as he would ever get. The leg would always hurt and his foot would never work entirely right again. But he kept the pain and disability under wraps when he went to work for the Brooklyn Service Department -- when then-Mayor John Coyne hired every local war vet who needed a job -- and later as a firefighter."

World War II vet recalls bloody scene at Anzio: A World at War - Metro - cleveland.com

 

"Last week, he shared those dark memories in a low voice, barely above a whisper, occasionally fighting off anger or tears. He remembered:
• German shells whistling overhead as a jeep took Shealy to join his new unit. “I knew then that I was really in the war. I didn’t know a soul. I thought, ‘This is it.’”
• Dashing across an open road, on his first day of combat, one soldier after another, under enemy machine gun fire, with the occasional man dropping dead.
• Three days later, standing beside a friend, Charles Conley of Proctor, N.C., as his head was removed by an artillery shell.
• Evacuating wounded after Germans, hidden behind tombstones in a graveyard, ambushed his platoon. “A sergeant said we lost half our men.”
• Staring at a headless, armless corpse during a calm moment after taking the graveyard. “It looked like a half track had turned around on him. A sergeant told me, ‘Don’t look. You’ll crack up quick enough anyway.’”
• A German 88-mm artillery piece rising slowly out of a bunker in the Maginot Line and firing. The Americans attacked it with a bulldozer.
• Playing dead while entangled in barbed wire as machine gun fire blazed overhead. “My own guys thought I was dead, too.”
• A German soldier sitting mortally wounded, screaming. A U.S. soldier walking up and shooting him in the head to put him out of his misery. “I didn’t have the heart to do that. War is hell.”
• Watching as U.S. P-47 fighter planes, across the Rhine River, strafed a corral of more than two dozen horses on the German side. “The Germans were using them to pull artillery pieces.”

World War II veteran recalls months spent on the front lines - S.C. at War - The State

 

"The worst battle Tepera was involved in was the infamous Battle of the Bulge in Bastogne, Belgium, where blood and snow could be seen everywhere. One night, as the men slept in an open field, Tepera said he felt something pressing on his back, but was too tired to care and disregarded it as a branch of some kind. He awoke to find a German soldier's foot sticking out of the ground on the very spot he slept on.

There were frozen bodies everywhere. It was 40 below zero. We were acclimated and got ready for that in training. They ran us through some pretty rigorous stuff he said.

The men were given small rations of food that included hash, a few crackers and a chocolate bar, barely enough to sustain them.

It was H-E-L-L. The first time we encountered the Germans, we lost five officers, a few were killed and the others were wounded. We lost our company commander and all our leadership.

From the beginning I had faith in God. Courage means you take yourself and you go on anyway. I was made a platoon sergeant,said Tepera.

Replacements came in the form of young men who were not properly prepared for warfare. Some had a hard time loading their own weapons.

They were young, 18, 19 and 20, and I felt sorry for them. I don't think anyone should be sent to battle without a reasonable amount of training, said Tepera. When you see the tragedy of how people get killed, I started wondering why we were fighting. I know we were sent to stop Hitler from taking over Europe, but in a war, everyone loses. We lost a lot of men and a lot were wounded.
Navasota Examiner

 

War, Frank J. Pistone, Sr. said, should never be glorified.
“In Hollywood movies, they glamorize the war,” Pistone said, “using terms like ‘Band of Brothers.’ That’s pure hogwash. At all the great battles you never knew anyone for more than a week. You didn’t even want to get close to anybody. The losing (of life) was sad.”

Veteran recalls WWII battles - Independence, MO 64050 - The Examiner

 

Thank you so much for posting up all the really intensive stuff. It's really sobering to people who are used to seeing and reading about war as this grand and glorious thing. No war movie can truly capture the horror and pain of the way people died in that war (gas chambers, dismemberment, etc.) no matter how hard they try.

 

"Sixty-five years after he clambered out of a Navy landing craft knee-deep into waters off New Guinea, Troy Martin finds that his first impressions haven't softened.

So many memories vie for consideration as the worst part of his World War II service on the central Pacific island just south of the equator that they're hard to rank.

There was malaria, which nearly killed him. There was the heat and humidity, which both soared into the 90s nearly every day. Jungle rot he got then plagues him still.

There was the jungle itself, so thick that he couldn't see Japanese soldiers bent on killing him till they were a few feet away. And there were thousands of them, entrenched and fanatically dedicated to his annihilation and that of the entire 41st Infantry Division.

They almost succeeded.

"Of the 200 guys in our company when we went over, I was one of six left when the war was over," the 90-year-old Billings man said in an interview before Veterans Day.

It was all close and personal, and hatred of the enemy on both sides was visceral. There was no respect and no sympathy in terrible combat that was some of the fiercest of World War II. For many who fought there, the enmity exists even today.

Thousands died on both sides before the island was more or less secured so Gen. Douglas MacArthur could advance and recapture the Philippines. Martin was with him all the way. The 41st Division boasts in its official history that in 45 months overseas, the longest deployment of any division in World War II, it racked up 380 days of combat.

"In all that time, I never had a furlough. I never saw my parents or my girlfriend," he said.

When he wrote to them, all the censors would let him say was that he was fine. Most of the time, he was not. Bullets flew everywhere, and friends fell at his side. At times there was little food and only brackish water to drink. And almost every day it rained. On the north side of the island, where most of the fighting took place, annual rainfall can be as much as 300 inches. In monsoon season, 8 to 10 inches a day is not unusual.

"You slept in the rain," Martin remembered. "You dug a foxhole at night to sleep in, and when you woke up the next morning, it was half full of water."

Every mission was on foot. The jungle was too thick for vehicles. Artillery was mostly useless, and combat was hand-to-hand.

"We were issued a gun, a hand grenade and a machete to cut through the jungle," he said.

He also had to carry his Browning Automatic Rifle, a shovel to dig a foxhole, all his ammunition and a canteen that held less than a quart of water.

"You ran into pockets of Japs scattered throughout the island," Martin said. "We didn't take prisoners. We were told you shot everyone. We didn't have the rations to feed them or the men to guard them."

The Japanese were desperate, too. Some starved to death in the inhospitable environment, where rations could not get through and tropical diseases were as deadly as combat. There were reports, too, of Japanese eating the bodies of American soldiers, which helped to harden the attitude of the 41st.

Tokyo Rose, the radio broadcaster whose anti-American propaganda filled airwaves in the Pacific, called the 41st the "Butcher Division" for its reputation for taking no prisoners. It was more affectionately nicknamed "The Jungleers" by the Americans.

"I was a first scout," Martin said. "A lot of the time I was the first one to engage the enemy."

Some men broke under the strain of the prolonged misery of the campaign, he said. A few shot themselves in the shoulder or foot so they could be sent somewhere - anywhere - else.

"If a Jap wounded you, it was called a million-dollar wound," he said. "You got to go home."

A sense of fatalism settled on others.

"I knew this kid from Absarokee," he remembered. "He got up one morning and said it was going to be his last day. I tried to talk him out of it, but sure enough, a Jap got him right through the head. ... He was a little short guy."

The enemy liked to attack at night, Martin said. One night while guarding a road, he heard Japanese troops approaching.

"They yelled like dogs," he said. "I used a tracer bullet and shot one in the chest. The bullet lit everything up, and I could see everything."

The Japanese soldier was able to crawl to the side of the road, where Martin could hear him moaning. When daylight came, Martin said, he finished him off.

It was a hard world in 1943, and sometimes it took hard men.

"After practically all your friends have been killed, sometimes right beside you; when you're in combat so long, you get harder. You just take it for granted that it's going to happen."

The scariest part of his service, Martin said, was retrieving the wounded.

"You had to take them out at night," he said. "You never knew where the Japs were. It took four guys on a stretcher to get them out, and it was slow going."

Natives on the island were friendly, he said. Sometimes they would infiltrate a Japanese camp and find out where the soldiers slept.

"Then we'd go in at night and kill them," he said.

Mosquitoes proved almost as deadly as the Japanese, and one of them infected with malaria felled Martin. When he landed in the field hospital, his temperature had spiked to 108 degrees. He lay on a dirt floor shivering in blankets piled around him for three days. He doesn't recall that the medical team did much to help him.

"I guess they thought I was going to die," he said. "When I didn't die, they finally flew me out to a hospital at Fort Moresby."

Fort Moresby was an Australian post on the southern part of New Guinea.

"They gave me food for the first time - a slice of bread," he said. "That was the best piece of cake I ever had in my life."

He was in the hospital for 30 days. Malaria hit him two more times during the war, but not as hard.

Martin fought in New Guinea and then Dutch New Guinea on the other side of the island, and on Biak Island a little to the north. The Dutch government paid him a small sum that supplemented the $21 a month he was getting from Uncle Sam.

Biak proved as nasty as New Guinea. The mission there was to take a Japanese airstrip.

"They let us come right up to their lines, and when we got to the airstrip they opened fire on us," he said. "We were cut off for a week."

They were able to obtain water only when the tide washed onto the nearby rocks. When water rushed back out, enough fresh water came with it to make it drinkable.

In December 1944, the 41st Division was on its way to the Philippines. Its members fought on the southern islands at Palawan, Zamboanga and Sulu Archipelago. Martin had earned his ticket home by then and was waiting to catch a ship for the West Coast when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima Aug. 6, 1945. The Japanese surrendered eight days later.

He doesn't remember any celebrations or much of any reaction at all when the news of war's end reached his unit. But he knew he was ready to come home. His return was delayed a month because ships were now headed for Japan instead of California.

He credits his mother's prayers with seeing him safely through the war.

"I believe God pulled me through," he said. "I went through too much; too many scrapes where I wouldn't have given a nickel for my life."

BillingsGazette.com :: WWII in Pacific still haunts Montana veteran

 

Thanks. Unfortunately some here have no concept of what war is really like other then what they see on TV and the movies. Or just a general lack of knowledge. Some even worse base thier views on what they see in videogames. None are nowhere near what it is like. Thankfully there are some Vets who are still here that at least can pass on some of what they experiences were. And Hopefully open the eyes of those whio think war is "cool","awesome and "glorious".

 

These experiences are some good examples of the sacrifices that our veterans have gone through and why we should truly respect thier service.

 

The title of this thread caught my eye, because it resonates with whatI I've been trying to do (without much success} ever since I returned home after 35 missions as a B17 navigator in the 8th Air Force. I will post no pictures here of the abominable atrocities that occur daily in any war, although I do believe pictures similar to those on this thread have to be shown to those still unaware that war is indeed Hell. However, keep in mind that no picture, report, or conversation can reveal the true horror that men in combat undergo and can never forget. I, for one, will never forget how often I squeezed the cheeks of my ass to keep from shitting my pants as we headed straight into large boxes of greasy black flak. It may be worth remarking that while other military combatants were taught to evade or seek cover when fired on, bomber pilots had the discipline to fly straight into the heart of darkness where the flak was most heavy, over the target. No 8th Air Force plane was ever turned back by enemy action. Wounded crew members could not call for a Medic. Many of them died from loss of blood with no more aid than a fellow crewman could supply from an on board Boy Scout first aid kit. All this in temperatures ranging down to 60 below zero. And for those fortunate to make it back to base, there was always tomorrow and another mission. This was tough duty indeed as for all combat men, infantry, navy, or marines. This is a damn good thread. Keep up the good work and for more information see B-17 B-24 Pictures Information 8th Air Force Flying Fortress Liberator Ploesti Schweinfurt Merseberg Berlin missions.

b17sam

 

German civilian at Dresden being burned in pyre after the February 14/15 bombing raid. So many were killed that they could not be buried quickly enough.

Thanks to Jeff/Slipdigit

 

"In February 1945, Shorten was in a plane that never returned to its base. Instead, over Germany, the plane was targeted.
"It was something fierce," he said. "It was the one time I really began to get concerned about whether we would make it."
Shorten heard dialogue between the pilot, co-pilot and flight engineer in the plane, as engines started shutting down.
"I heard ‘uh-oh,'" he said. "Airplanes like that don't fly very well under one engine."
Unable to gain altitude to fly over the Alps to Italy, the flight crew turned the plane toward Switzerland in hopes of the country allowing them in.
"They didn't want us," he said. "They were shooting at us, but shooting wide of us. The Swiss shot down a lot of American planes."
The plane landed in a farmer's field and the crew scattered. "We ran like the dickens because we were afraid it would blow up," he said.
Armed soldiers showed up and they were taken in and sent to an internment camp in a mountain town, which used gutted hotels for the soldiers.
Back at their base in Italy, fellow soldiers raided the tents of the crew. Some took Shorten's shoes and a watch that was a graduation present from his parents.
"They didn't know what had happened to us, they just knew we weren't coming back," he said. "I tell you, your attitude about life and death changes quickly in those circumstances."
The crew never returned to their squadron in Italy, but instead were released after the war. Shorten and his comrades were shipped to Camp Lucky Strike in France, then across the ocean to New Jersey. A native of Scranton, Pa., Shorten returned to his parents and younger brother and sister.
"When I set foot back on U.S. soil again, I stood for a moment and I made a solemn vow to never leave again," he said. "It was easy to get over, but it was hell getting back."
He never returned to his original college, saying his nerves were too shattered.
"I was bad at the whole world," he said. "Flying these combat missions was very, very stressful, [and] warps you out of shape." Instead he finished his education at the University of Scranton, changing his course of study. "I switched to physics because I was through flying," he said."

Mount Airy veteran recalls service during World War II

 

Thanks for your post and for your service. And thanks for the thanks LOL.

 

Heres a good article from a vet about the "glorious" and "cool" and "awesome" life it was to be a POW. Heres an excerpt,

The great escape: WWII veteran talks about life in POW camp


"After a short, desperate show of resistance, Parkinson’s entire battalion surrendered.

The American prisoners were marched 21 miles and herded into stock pens where they spent the night hugging the rails of the pens so as not to get sucked into the muck.

Early the next morning, the GIs were prodded into train boxcars for the trip to Germany and confinement in POW camps.

“It was 60 guys with diarrhea locked into one boxcar for six days — wow,” Parkinson said.

And they still hadn’t eaten anything but snow, the nitrogen in which having caused the loose
bowels.

On the second or third day of the miserable journey, Parkinson heard the hum of an airplane over the rattle of the rails, and it seemed to be diving in closer.

Then bullets came piercing through the wooden sides of the cars. Men started screaming.

The Allied pilot didn’t know that the Nazi train was carrying POWs because the cars weren’t marked on top like they were supposed to be. He made two passes and strafed the train from front to rear on both sides before knocking out the engine.

In his own boxcar, three back from the coal car, Parkinson had managed not to get hit. Others weren’t so lucky.

“About six guys caught it — bingo,” he said, snapping his fingers. “But there was nothing we could do for them.”

Parkinson finally arrived at what would be his home for the next several months — Stalag IV-B, located just east of the Elbe River and about 30 miles north of Dresden, Germany.

Covering 75 acres, the POW camp was one of the largest in Germany during World War II. When Parkinson arrived with the rest of the 7,500 American prisoners, there were already about 11,000 Allied soldiers of all nationalities confined there.

“If you want to imagine what the Tower of Babel sounded like, that’s what it was,” Parkinson said.
“There were about 10 different languages being spoken there.”

He soon got a feel of things.

Though the Germans fed most of the prisoners (excepting the Russians) on a more or less regular basis, by that stage of the war it was mostly thin soup and morsels of bad bread.

After the D-Day invasion the previous June, Red Cross packages only trickled into the camp, as the Allies relentlessly bombed German trains.

To supplement their meager rations, the prisoners horded what aid packages made it through and developed an actual market system. Gold rings and watches and cigarettes were the currency.

“Tobacco was number 1,” Parkinson said. “Money didn’t mean a thing. You might as well use it as rolling paper.”

Even tobacco became scarce after a time and Parkinson, a heavy pipe smoker, began lighting up English tea that came inside the British Red Cross packets.

“Between the garbage the Germans were feeding us and the Red Cross packages, it wasn’t too bad,” Parkinson said. “Still, if you wanted to lose weight, being there (in the camp) was a good way to do it. We were subsisting, but that was about it.”

Parkinson became pals with many of the British prisoners who had been captured the year before in the failed Market Garden campaign, as they played cribbage, a game he happened to enjoy. He also liked their dispositions.

And so he settled into his circumstances. The Germans assembled the prisoners early each morning for a head count and the rest of the day Parkinson spent exercising and playing cribbage with the English troops.

Parkinson and the other POWs got one cold shower a month, during which time they also scrubbed out their uniforms.

No one was sent to the camp infirmary unless they were very bad off. The Russians didn’t receive any medical treatment whatsoever.

One day ran into another, every day the same as the one before. The endless boredom could be deceiving, however.

“It was survival, period — there’s no other word to use for it,” Parkinson stated. “If you let down your guard, you had it, you bought the farm.”

As winter turned into spring, the prisoners nightly picked up the BBC on carefully hidden radios. It didn’t take a genius to figure out the Allies were winning the war. And getting closer to the camp.

One day in April, Parkinson was playing cribbage with some British soldiers around a table in one of the barracks when he heard a sound he recognized: The buzz of an American fighter plane.

Based on his last experience with “friendly planes,” he should have been wary.

The American pilot opened up with his machine guns on the enclosed camp, making no less than three passes and criss-crossing it with deadly fire.

Parkinson’s English cribbage partner, sitting directly across from him, caught a bullet square in the middle of his back.

“He never knew what hit him,” Parkinson said. “He was just across the table from me. How lucky can you be, huh? After that, everyone hated Americans. And all because some punk kid in an airplane wanted to shoot at something.”


The great escape: WWII veteran talks about life in POW camp - Neosho, MO - Neosho Daily News

 

"I lay shivering in the pasture that night, feeling the snow melt as it hit my face. I was thirsty and I licked my lips to get a little of it. I covered my face as best I could with my helmet and tried to doze off but the sound of exploding shells made sleep all but impossible even though I was dog tired. My hands were cold and my feet were soaking wet. Trickles of ice cold water soaked into my shirt collar. I had two pairs of socks on but the leather combat boots we'd been issued weren't waterproof and my feet were wet. Shortly after that miserable night Wenzel tells stories of being fired upon by a German SS tank and having his helmet shot off by the flying shrapnel; of a platoon sergeant suffering psychosomatic blindness from the horrors he'd witnessed; and his injury in a horrific German artillery attack. "

WiscNews.com : Sauk Prairie Eagle

 

"Then, during the Battle of the Bulge, he was wounded. A German carbine bullet sliced off part of his tongue, claimed eight teeth and tore a hole in his throat, lodging near his larynx. But it was the metal-covered Bible in his breast pocket that stopped the bullet headed for his heart."

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articl...rkins1123.html

 

With the recent problems this morning I hope those who had posted in the last coupla days will repost .

 

Death frees WWII vet after 62 years of mental torment
By Lou Michel
News Staff Reporter
Before Edward F. Kielich marched off to some of the bloodiest fighting in World War II, he was like a father to his little sister, Peggy, reading her comic books and making up voices for the different characters.
He was the father she never knew.
When Kielich returned home from the war, he was silent and continually paced the floors of the family’s South Buffalo home. The young sister wondered: “Where’s my brother?”
He ended up spending 62 years in a Department of Veterans Affairs nursing home, his mind devastated by the horror of a war that psychologically impacted two of his other brothers as well. But Kielich’s family says he is finally free. The 86-year-old Army veteran died Nov. 16 in the Canandaigua facility.
Edward Kielich and his brother Gene had participated in the D-Day invasion of Normandy at Omaha Beach, which became known as “Bloody Omaha” because of the high number of casualties.
A third brother, Henry, flew in more than 60 missions above Poland and Germany, and a fourth brother came within a whisker of serving in World War II, had it not been for their mother’s fierce intervention.
After fighting his way into France, Edward Kielich became an anti-aircraft gunner and continued fighting all the way into Germany. He never suffered a scratch from enemy fire, but the carnage he witnessed devastated his mind.
Except for a few months at home in 1946, he would spend the rest of his life — and it was a long one — in the VA nursing home.
“I couldn’t believe they sent him home. I was 12 years old and wondered where’s my brother. He just didn’t talk to anyone and he paced the floor. Back then, my mother referred to it as shell shock,” Peggy Chapin said of what is now known as post traumatic stress.
The youngest of 11 brothers and sisters, Chapin, an Elma resident, said her father, John, a well known South Buffalo barber, had died six weeks after she was born in 1934 and her mother went out to work at a chemical factory.
But that was not enough and in time Ann Kielich was forced to pull her older children out of high school so that they could work and help support the family.
Edward Kielich was among the bread winners.
“I looked forward to Edward coming home from work. He’d put me up on his lap and would read comic books. There was a lot of laughter and joy,” she said.
In 1943, the laughter ended.
Edward Kielich was drafted into the Army. Gene Kielich would also be drafted into the Army. Henry Kielich enlisted in the Air Force. Paul Kielich, 16 at the time, also wanted to serve like his older brothers and enlisted unbeknown to his mother.
“My mother went down to the enlistment center and said ‘My God, you already have three of my sons and this son is just a child. He’s only 16.’ She got him out of the Army,” said Chapin, 74.
All three brothers who served in the war, the sister said, were never the same, though Gene and Henry managed to carve out lives for themselves.
“None of them were right, they all suffered terribly for what they saw and did for this country. That’s why we’re all able to have the freedom we have today. They fought for this country that they loved,” she said.
And now with Edward’s passing, all three are gone.
But, Chapin says she feels a need to share with others just how much Edward sacrificed for others.
He spent some 62 years in the nursing facility at the Canandaigua VA, but his family never forgot him. Every week or couple of weeks someone visited him.
He smoked cigarettes incessantly, until the VA adopted a no-smoking policy and he was weaned off tobacco.
In later years, he managed to utter a word or two and on one special occasion, he said, “I miss Mom.” Other times, he communicated by facial expression or a squeeze of the hand.
“He always held my hand and when I’d squeeze, he’d squeeze back. When I arrived at the hospital, he would smile. He always had a smile for me,” Chapin said, pausing to weep over her brother’s lost life.
Chapin says that it was her family’s solemn duty to make sure Edward got the care he needed and that they fought with the government until it finally realized its mistake and agreed to provide him with care.
She wishes she had visited more often but said that when she married and started raising a family, she could only travel to the Finger Lakes facility once a month.
But this past year, Edward’s heart started to give out and she began visiting once a week, sometimes twice.
“He was there when we needed him. He always sent his money home from the Army,” she said. “That’s why I loved taking care of my brother Edward because he took care of me.”
Some time next month, Edward Kielich will be buried with full military honors in Arlington National Cemetery.
His sister says it is a fitting place for her brother, who suffered more than six decades.

Death frees WWII vet after 62 years of mental torment : Home: The Buffalo News

 

Sometimes people are still fighting the war and its memories for years after. Some are able to deal with what they did and saw and some can't. The psychological wounds can be just as deep with veterans and others who lived through the hell of war.