WW2 Effects on Our Families and Lives?

[Bob Potter]

It's not so much a family thing, but a friend thing.

I went to community schools for my twelve-and-a-half years of Delaware state required public education. As a result, there were a lot of kids that I got to know "for the duration." One fellow I did the entire "hitch" with, even being in the same homeroom throughout high school.

In our junior year we began to part company, over our differing perspectives on American involvement in the Vietnam war. My father was a WWII vet, a combat engineer in North Africa and Italy. I knew my friend's father was also a vet but I did not know what he did. We were, as Captain Aubrey says, "much of a muchness," enjoyd the same hobbies, liked history, did not like sports. The only real difference that I knew of was that my father's people came to American in the 1630's, while his father's father was a Russian or Lithuanian immigrant at the turn of the last century.

In college, I enrolled in ROTC, while he was present when the ROTC building on his campus was burned down.

It was not until I read his father's obituary that I understood why he and I had such divergent ideas about war and service. His father was a medic with the 29th Division on Omaha Beach on 6 June 1944. The stories we heard as kids were entirely different, so we reacted differently.

I saw him again about a month ago for the funeral services for his mother. I think there has been too much water under the bridge, although it pleased me to relate this to him and to tell him that in this he has become one of my teaching examples.

Bob Potter