[AT] Thank You Vets

[Don]

My father joined the Marines in 1938.  He was in the maneuvers in Camp 
Lejeune where they used trucks with stove pipes to pretend to be tanks 
and bombed with sacks of flower.  My mother said that they lived in a 
converted chicken coop.

He was in Perl on December 7 building barracks and was in several 
Pacific island invasions including Guam where he was wounded.  He was 
one of those who went into caves and in one a suicide with a hand 
grenade blew him back out.  He always said he was "Shot in the ass on 
Asan Point", one of the invasion beaches.  They sent him home and he 
spent the remainder of the war as a drill Sargent at Pendelton.  I 
always kidded my mother that I knew what they were doing to celebrate 
the end of the war, I was born in March of 1946.

I have looked in one of those caves on Asan Point, glad it was not me 
there.  But someone had to do it.  I have also looked up that draw on 
Omaha Beach on a nice June day and wandered through the cemetery at the top.

My little taste of war was working on helicopters while ridding a big 
boat with an airport on its roof off Viet Nam.

-- 
Don Bowen       --AD0NB--