Publisher's Synopsis
Have you ever been to the reunion of a military outfit? If you have, you'll know how easily a conversation can start out on a subject like food or sports, and then transition to the Battle of the Bulge or the flat on Mount Suribachi. Aaron Elson went to a reunion of the 712th Tank Battalion from World War II in 1987 hoping to find veterans who remembered his father, who died seven years earlier. He found three, and was so moved by the stories the veterans shared among themselves, yet rarely told their families, that he returned two reunions later with a tape recorder and never missed another reunion. Long before "Saving Private Ryan" and "The Greatest Generation" got an aging population of World War II veterans to open up about their experiences, these men shared stories with Elson that covered the width and breadth of the human experience, stories of courage, of fear, humorous stories, stories of fate, of romance, of food, of booze, of being chewed out by General George S. Patton. While Elson has conducted many individual oral history interviews with World War II veterans, the stories shared in the hospitality, sometimes corroborating other stories, sometime conflicting, have always been special.
