The Lets Read Podcast - 18: Episode 018 | Accidental Creeper & Veteran War Stories | 29 True Scary Horror Stories

Episode Date: January 6, 2019

Welcome to the eighteenth episode of The Lets Read Podcast! This podcast includes narrations of true creepy encounters submitted by normal folks just like yourself. Today you'll experience horrifying stories about NYC, Accidental Creepers, & Veteran War Heroes. HAVE A STORY TO SUBMIT?► www.Reddit.com/r/LetsReadOfficial FOLLOW ME ON- ► Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/letsread.official/ ► Twitter - https://twitter.com/LetsReadCreepy ►YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/c/letsreadofficial ♫ Background Music: Iron Cthulhu Apocalypse https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFvrqVSJE8E PATREON for EARLY ACCESS!►http://patreon.com/LetsRead

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This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. I got a job in New York City a couple of years ago. Personally, I am happy to be away from that place now, but I was able to experience many things and learn quite a bit there. These stories that I am about to talk about are not my personal experiences except for the last story. The other two are based on my co-workers that I was privileged to work with. I was given these stories because, as a foreigner, I was curious about how they lived in the city and decided to ask them about what their scariest experiences were while growing up in such a crazy place. Number one. First story was about my boss actually. He told me that there was an event he would never forget

when he was younger in high school. He was with a friend and they were kicking back after school ended while walking near one of the buildings that were around the Empire State Building. He said he was hanging out with one of his good friends and they both noticed that there was a human leg just chilling out on the sidewalk. Most of the busy people walking by that leg seemed to also just not bother to care as to why it was there or were just not interested in the situation. Apparently it was closer towards the wall of the building and they didn't really think much of it because they knew Halloween was coming up and thought maybe it was some prop for the store nearby. They found out later on that someone had ended their own life and the body was partly dangling some floors above them somewhere

while one of the legs was just hanging out having a good time on the sidewalk. There were a few things that bothered me about this story, like the fact that there wouldn't have been a lot of blood. Wouldn't people be freaking out? Maybe a few strangers did see the mess but decided not to make a scene. I'm not sure. At least from knowing my boss for a good three years, he's never lied to me. Story two. Another was from my co-worker that I worked with and was pretty close to. He also experienced something that I'm not even sure I would be mentally okay with seeing if I was his age. When he was in elementary school, apparently his school allowed them to take a dragon boat lesson. They would row out to one of the rivers, wasn't sure if it was the hudson or east river but

apparently when they were out in the boats his team saw something floating in the water they all rode closer towards it and he apparently said he saw a mat of hair and pale white melted skin all of them rode back and told the grown-ups what they had discovered and the cops went out and recovered it i remember asking him if any of them decided to turn it over but he said none of them were willing or even desired to turn the head around to see the face. I don't remember if he told me that they had found out it was a girl or a woman that the head belonged to. All I know is that I would have also not been okay after dealing with such an experience. Story 3 This last story is not as mentally scarring but just crazy.

This experience actually happened to me in my second year of working there. Don't live in this city if you're poor. Your conditions are that of caged rats. I live with five people in a crammed shoebox and I managed to fall ill with mono. Apparently all of my roommates had experienced mono already and there are no such things as dishwashers so I found out that anyone could have given me it, including my partner. I was sick in bed and finally coming to my second week of it. It felt a lot like flu and I just took it real easy. Around 2pm I realized I needed to

get out and get food to sort of fight the sickness because there was barely any room in the fridge to have groceries to cook for yourself with. So I was getting my slow self ready to go out and suddenly I hear what sounds like a loud smash. I thought a car crashed into another car and really didn't think anything of it. Until I heard someone screaming out, put the gun down multiple times while hearing someone else saying I didn't do it in an almost mumbling tone. I crawled to my window still fuzzy and spaced out while watching all of these people on the other sidewalk just stopping and filming everything with their phones. No one is running. I'm hearing these two men just

screaming at each other while everyone thinks it's an awesome time to Instagram a shooting. Something really twisted and dark clicked in me when I noticed this. I sit there for a good 15 minutes trying to figure out what I'm going to do. The cops arrive and I can barely see anything down below but I see a crowd forming around yellow tape. I decide to leave anyway because again I really needed food. My building is thankfully only five stories big so it was easy to walk down to the front door. The awkward thing however was realizing that your door is the actual crime scene and there's yellow tape all over your staircase while crowds of people are taking pictures of your sick

self. Thankfully the victim that was shot I believe was okay. It was a petty robbery. They did get shot in the stomach, but weirdly enough I didn't see any blood anywhere, which is bizarre. I politely asked the cop guarding the area if I was allowed to go through the crime scene to go get food. I remember he looked at me as if this happened every day. He looked exhausted. Which maybe it did. They allowed me out of the area and also gave me permission back in. At least the cops were nice. And needless

to say, New York is a pretty weird place. So for a bit of background, I'm a 30-year-old female that has worked for an ophthalmologist or eye doctor, since I always have to clarify for about nine years now. I work in a big city, but not in a very good area, right next to a meth clinic, in fact, so that's probably why this story happened in the first place. I'm a technician, which means I take the patients back to the rooms to get them ready to see the doctor. This guy comes in, must weigh about 400 pounds, and just starts acting very loud and obnoxious in our waiting room. Instead of bringing a list of his medications like we ask for, he brought a plastic shopping bag full, and I mean full, of pills. The way our office is set up is that we don't have sliding

check-in windows like some offices. We just have four desks in a row that you walk up to. The first desk is right next to a wall that has a small tinted window that we can quote-unquote see out of, but it really does crap. For that reason, we can't really see what's going on in the waiting room until we actually walk out there. So I have this guy's chart, and I'm getting ready to call him, and I notice that there's a huge line of patients waiting to check in. Now remember that I can't see what's going on until I actually get out there. What happened is that these people aren't checking in at all, but coming up to the desk to complain that this 400-pound man is stripping off his clothes in front of everyone. I take one look at this and go grab my boss who goes out and yells at him to stop. He tells her that he wants the doctor to see his scars. Like, are you kidding me? We're an eye

doctor dudes so we don't need to see all of that. He does end up getting dressed and I'm thinking that we're going to throw him out because really that's not okay. I know he obviously has mental or drug related issues but this isn't the place or at the very least he shouldn't go unsupervised. But no, we do end up seeing him and I'm still the one to take him back. I'm 5'3 on the shorter side and I've dealt with crazy patients before so I kind of put on my take no crap persona. I can't let him know that he gets to me. I'm instructed by my boss to take one of the other girls with me as a witness. Okay, whatever. I get him back in the room and after sitting in the exam chair, he immediately gets in my face saying I need to find someone to take out his eye.

I'm like, whoa, okay, slow slow down there buddy. I check his vision which is a perfect 20-20 and he's not complaining of any pain or anything strange he just wants his eye removed. So I'm trying to lighten the tension in this room by laughing slightly and saying something like well I'm not sure that would be a good idea. He says if I can't find someone to take out his eye that he's going to go down to the hospital and rip it out himself. Okay, my work here is done. The doctor will be with you soon. I'm not sure what happened in that room, but when he's on his way out, he got on our public phone and was speaking very loudly to someone, calling them terrible names and then hanging up

angrily. Then he left. I've read his charts saying that he isn't allowed back for obvious reasons. This is a very old incident. I'm a married mother of four in my late 30s now and this happened when I was 11 or 12 years old. My mom had taken me to a dentist appointment and afterwards dropped me off at my grandma's house so that she could go back to work. My grandma had a house with two barns in the middle of nowhere, lots of places to wander and explore. Plus she had a dish so I was happy to have a day off from school to do basically whatever I wanted. So I'm sitting in her big cozy armchair in her living room watching Animal Planet on her big screen TV. When the back door, directly to my left and across the dining room, opened.

In comes my great grandma, Mildred. She's nice, but I rarely see her. Behind her, however, is my waking nightmare. I'll call him Uncle Alan. He's my grandma's brother, so great uncle. He's the one the family always kept their kids away from just because he's creepy. And he is. I'm terrified of him because I know he's more than creepy. He abused my mom for years as a child, only stopping when she got to her teens and no longer appealed to him. My mom has mental issues

to this day because of what he put her him. My mom has mental issues to this day because of what he put her through. None of this was known to anyone besides my mom, dad, and me at this time. She was too terrified to tell anyone and didn't even tell her mother until she was in her 40s, a few years after this story takes place. So my grandma and Mildred are sitting on the couch and have no idea what he is, but I do. He leers at me, just 11 or 12 and looking 9 or 10 and I panicked. I wasn't alone but in blind fear I ran. I bolted out of my seat and out the front door. I went around the side of grandma's house and started toward the nearest barn, suddenly realizing I'm now alone and going to the barn would be a very

bad idea. So I circled the house to my the barn would be a very bad idea. So I circled the house to my grandma's bedroom window and climbed back inside. I had severe arachnophobia and there were two black widow spiders hanging underneath that window, but I climbed in anyway. That's how scared I was. Once inside, I didn't want to be around him, so I didn't go back to the living room. I looked around and decided to just hide until he and Mildred left. I dove under the bed. I had very short legs and a skirt around it so it was all thanks to my small for my age size that I could fit under there at all. I was under for about 20 minutes or so starting to feel silly and seriously considering coming out when I heard

footsteps coming down the hall. I figured it was my grandma and was about to crawl out, thinking I could stick to her and join the others again with her. But it wasn't her. I watched from my hiding spot as a pair of dirty boots came into the room. It was my uncle Alan. My heart raced. He moved to the opposite side of the room and seemed to look behind the entertainment center to the right of the foot of the bed, then back around and check the bathroom and towel cabinet attached to grandma's room on the left of the bed. Then my grandma's closet. Her closet is a walk-in. He went inside and I could hear him moving her things around, searching. I was near tears as he searched because even as a kid I knew he'd have no reason to be searching my grandma's bedroom. I knew he was looking for me. I could only assume that he didn't look under the bed

because it didn't look high enough for anyone to fit. After the closet he left. I don't know how long it was but I stayed until I overheard their goodbyes and then I crawled out. I went to the living room, sat down beside my grandma's feet. I didn't dare move again. I found out later that my grandma and Mildred had gone down the road for a few minutes to drop something off at a friend's house. That must have been the time he was searching for me. It turned out that he'd only left to pick up a car part with my grandpa and came back a short while later. I'll never forget the look on his face, seeing me sitting at my grandma's feet. I guess it was a cross between rage and hate. It was gone instantly.

He and Mildred left shortly after this and I went back to watching Animal Planet, trying to calm my nerves. My mom arrived about an hour later, made small talk and then we left. I never told her about what happened that day. She knew he'd been at the house from talking to my grandma but didn't ask me about it. I don't know if she even knew my grandma had left the house while he was there. I'm just glad he never checked under that bed and it makes me sick to my stomach to think what would have happened if he did. My brother made a post on rletsnotme four years ago. You can see my comment in the comment section of the original post in his confirmation that

I am indeed his sister. I only made some changes to the grammar and I originally thought of writing it but told my brother he should because he would have a better memory of this event and was more aware of the situation. He was about 13, and I was just about to turn 9. If you want to hear it from my perspective, I can write it in the comments. From my brother's perspective. I was about 13 years old when this incident occurred, so it was 8 years ago, I think. Me and my family

were on vacation in Orlando, and we were staying at the Nickelodeon Hotel. Very cool place, nice water parks, and nice rooms. I was with my family, my mom, dad, brother, and two sisters. I'm the oldest. We were at Universal Studios for the day, and I got back rather late. On the way to our room, my parents were carrying all of the merchandise we bought, which was a lot because they had four kids, so they kind of fell behind. Me and my two sisters around the ages of eight and six all got ahead of them together. My parents and brother about age ten were behind us. The elevator was just around the corner. Me and my sister got to it first. The elevator opened just as we were walking around the corner. Me and my sister got to it first. The elevator opened just as we were

walking around the corner. As we were walking around the corner a man stepped off the elevator. I barely got a look at him because as soon as he saw me and my sisters he immediately got back on without missing a beat. I should have known that was a bad sign but unfortunately I was a little slow back then so it never occurred to me that this guy was trouble, plus my parents were not there to see the man, so they never stopped us from getting on the elevator. My sisters were rushing to get on the elevator because they were at the, I want to press the button age. We all get on to see the man standing with his head facing the ground, both hands behind his back, and standing in the back of the elevator. He was very creepy looking.

He had brown hair that reached the middle of his neck and looked like he hadn't showered in weeks. He looked like he was in his late 40s, early 50s because he had many wrinkles on his face and a creepy grin. He was wearing black jeans, a red, black and white flannel and a black turtleneck underneath. Keep in mind we were in Florida and this was a hot night so it was weird that he was wearing all of these layers. My youngest sister goes to press the fourth floor button but all of the buttons were lit up already. I wish I could say that was what made me realize we were in trouble but it didn't click just yet that this guy pressed all of the buttons. I held the door open for my parents and brother and then my mom looked at the guy.

I will never forget the face she made. She had a huge smile on her face looking at my brother but when she looked at the man, that smile instantly dropped. I saw the look of terror in my mom's face. My dad even gave a strange look at the guy like he knew to watch out for him. That was the moment when I realized that this man was up to no good. Once the elevator doors closed, my parents stood on each side of the man staring at him, just waiting to jump into action in case he made a move. My brother asked my sisters out loud, Why did you guys press all the buttons?

And the older one of my two sisters, still completely oblivious to what was happening, blurted out, That guy did it! And pointed right at the man. My mom let out a nervous giggle. The elevator was slow, but finally got to the second floor. The man quickly got out of the elevator and went down the hallway. As soon as he left, my mom quickly closed the doors and we continued up. We stopped at the third floor, closed the doors, then got to our floor, the fourth floor. My parents made sure we stayed with them this time. We got to our room and that is when my parents started to freak out.

My dad called the front desk to warn them about what happened so they could check it out. That was the last we ever saw of that man. We don't even know if the people at the hotel found him. All I can say now is I'm glad my family and I are still alive. God only knows what he would have done to one of us or all of us if my parents weren't there. So I just posted a true story that was from the perspective of my brother. I decided to write this from my perspective and even called my parents to ask them what they remembered from the event. Now this crazy experience happened to my family when I was about 13 years ago in an elevator at the Nickelodeon Hotel that still creeps me out to this day.

I was just a young girl about to turn 9 years old. My siblings, which included two older brothers and a younger sister, were 13, 10, and 7 years old at the time. We'll call my 13-year-old brother Joey, my 10-year-old brother Michael, and my 7-year-old sister Marie. At the time, the kids' TV network, Nickelodeon, was constantly advertising the Nickelodeon Hotel in Orlando, Florida. The commercials showed so many cool things, such as a water park, the chance of getting the famous slime dumped on you, getting to meet the characters of your favorite shows, basically people dressed up as those characters, and other fun stuff. I begged my parents to take us. During that time, it was every little kid's dream to have that green slime poured all over them, and even though Nickelodeon had some competition with Disney Channel and Cartoon Network,

Nickelodeon was still most kids' favorite channel. Eventually, my parents decided to get an awesome suite one summer in July. The hotel was pretty fun. I didn't get to live out my fantasy of getting the green slime dumped on me, but my family and I enjoy this place overall. One of those days in Orlando, we decided to go to Universal Studios Florida and the Universal Islands of Adventure. I don't remember much of the day besides going to the Mummy ride, the Incredible Hulk coaster, and the Back to the Future ride a bunch of times.

We ended up coming back late. When we got back to the hotel, Marie and I were racing towards the elevator to get the privilege to press the button with Joey not far behind us. My parents fell behind because they were carrying all the merchandise we bought at Universal Studio. Michael was walking next to my parents. I barely was aware of anything else at that time. My only goal was to press the button because I was a kid amused by doing stuff like that. Once Marie and I made it, we noticed that all the buttons were already pressed and there was a man in the elevator. We didn't notice this at the time, but according to Joey, he was getting off of the elevator, but when he spotted Marie and I traveling around the corner to the elevator, he got back on.

I should have been more aware of my surroundings. My public school and parents had pushed the stranger danger mindset on me. In my childlike mind, I didn't see any danger. This stranger was not trying to talk to me, get me in his car, entice me with candy, touch me in a spot that he was not supposed to touch, or hurt me in any way. Plus, I knew my parents were somewhere behind me. This man was very strange looking. He was probably in his 40s or 50s. He had greasy brown hair that reached the middle of his neck. I also remember him being fairly tall but that could have been due to my childlike view of the world. His outfit consisted of black jeans and a black turtleneck with a flannel shirt covering it. Looking back, this was

strange because it was extremely hot tonight in Florida, probably around 90 degrees Fahrenheit. He also had a creepy smile. According to Joey, my mom was smiling looking at Michael, but once her eyes looked at the strange man, her smile completely dropped. While my dad didn't have as dramatic of a change of his face, he also noticed him and found him suspicious. My parents rushed to the elevator and stood on both sides of him. They didn't even need to discuss any plan

because they both knew what to do. My mom and dad were ready to attack him at any moment if he tried to touch a single strand of hair on their kids. While my mom might not be as tall as the average woman, my dad is a 6 foot 2 tall stocky man and can look pretty intimidating when you don't know him. Trust me when I say that my parents knew how to kick someone's butt when they messed with their family or friend. I usually never promote violence but creeps like this man probably deserve it. During this entire time he kept looking down and had his hands behind his back. Keep in mind I was only aware of many of the details years afterwards, probably in my teen years. Michael asked Marie and I why we pressed every button. We both informed him that neither of us did this, and very loudly, I innocently and naively announced,

that guy did it, while pointing at the creepy man. My mom just nervously laughed. According to my oldest brother Joey, the strange man got off on the second floor. According to my mom, he stayed and only our family got off on the fourth floor, which was the floor our room was on. I honestly couldn't remember. I have learned in a psychology course that kids often create false memories, so I think that my mom was probably correct, but it really doesn't matter. When we got off the elevator to our floor my mom made sure we stayed together. My mom would usually only demand that we were very close to one another when we were at a crowded place. I remember finding

this kind of strange but I just brushed this feeling off my shoulders and followed her orders. Once we got into our room my dad called hotel security. This is when I finally was aware of the danger of the situation. Back then, I thought that this man would maybe just kidnap my sister and I because he is a bad person. Now I believe that this man was something worse and wanted to do terrible things to my sister and I. My guess is that he pressed all the buttons to prevent others from using it and possibly get away with something on the elevator. Maybe he would have taken us to his room with the promise of something else. Maybe he would have picked us up and abducted us.

He could have possibly had a knife but once he saw my parents he knew he could not take on both adults. Even though I have an idea of what he would have done, I wonder what would have happened if my parents did not make it to the elevator or my brother was not far behind us. Another thing I wondered is if he might have only been after my little sister. He could have also been after my oldest brother as well, but I doubt this. Joey said he was looking at us girls when he walked back in the elevator. If I had to guess why he was wearing all those layers, I would say that he was probably trying to cover up specific tattoos or birthmarks. I did some research online and one thing I found is that in the state of Florida when a person

registers as an offender, he or she is required to give many details about themselves, including tattoos and other identifying marks. To this day, I don't know if they ever found the creep. I just hope other kids were as lucky as us. For some background, I'm a 14-year-old male living in a city on the east coast known for crabs. I attend a fairly nice private school and generally have loved it, except for one teacher. I'll call her by her first name, Laurel, because she was truly an awful soul. I first met Laurel on everyone else's second day of fifth grade as I was sick on the first day. As we all poured into our homerooms, the teacher,

who we'll call Mrs. B, talked about our morning announcements while Laurel stood in the back. She was the theater teacher, which means she didn't have a classroom. This is also the reason why some people excuse her actions towards me because she was just acting. Like any fresh out of lower school student, I accidentally called out. No big deal, as I am sure everybody had already in their first day. When the bell rings everybody stands up to go to chapel and she calls me over to her. I am most likely expecting some sort of hey don't call out thing from a teacher and I was correct but off by years. It starts out normal enough and then goes south really quickly.

She begins berating me on how I'm acting like a two-year-old and how her child is acting better than me and how I shouldn't have the privilege of being at such an elite school. All the while her two-year-old is right with her knocking over everything at waist height in the classroom. After her speech is finished I am visibly shaken and have tears in my eyes. Laurel then looks at me, laughs, and goes to her class. Obviously, I tell my parents that night, and my mom seems ticked, but didn't say anything to any staff as it was too early in the year for anybody to care. Fast forward a few weeks of beration and complaining to my parents,

and the big kicker comes. While sitting at carpool waiting for my mother, I get pushed into a wall by one of my peers after repeatedly saying their name. I was taken aback as I was doing this the day before and he was playing along. Laura had seen this and talked to the other classmate for about two minutes and then comes up to me. She, in an incredibly serious tone, tells me that all of this was my fault as he was in a bad mood because he had been caught playing Roblox. Yes, it was at this time, in the library when he wasn't supposed to. When I tell her that I didn't know, I could see her eyes go

blood red. She tells me that back talk is unacceptable and that I am messing with a giant here. She then threatens to tie my shoes together and make me walk to my backpack which was in another area at the time. As a smart little kid I decided the best response was, but if I fell you'd break my nose. She then laughed and in the most serious tone told me, that's the plan. Now if you don't go over there and tell Johnny that you're sorry, I'll go through with my promise." At this moment I'm visibly crying and people around me are starting to take interest.

She says another barrage of hurtful comments and in my sobbing I can see my mom's car pull up. Thinking this is my chance I start to get up and tell her I have to leave. When I do this she physically sits me back down and tells me to wait till she goes and talks to my mother. According to her, Laura walked up to the window and introduced herself and said that I was the instigator in an instant that left another student hurt, which now looking back on it, is not what happened at all. Laura looks behind herself and motions for me to come to the car. I walk right past her and get in the front of my mom's car.

As we pull away, the waterworks come out. I'm screaming and crying and try my best to tell her what just happened. My mom was floored. She called my father who was at work and told me to explain the whole thing. I once again told my dad the story and he over the phone seems angry. He said he'd figured it out and told my mom to stay out of it. She did and as far as I know nothing came of it. Skipping to the middle of fifth grade she's in a hallway huddle with the whole grade. A hallway huddle where the

whole grade plops into the biggest classroom to go over grade events and whatnot. After learning that someone in a different grade got hurt in a game of football on the field by a kid in a whole different grade, she goes off. While berating our grade, she then calls our whole grade douchebags. Yep. She then dismisses kids who were in her opinion being good and surprise, surprise, guess who wasn't in that group? Yours truly. The kids who stayed inside were yelled at and got emails home. Of course, the first thing I tell my mom when I get home was what Laurel said to us. Again, my mom was floored and grabbed her computer to write a very angry email to the school.

This time, they decided to be somewhat helpful and put her on a break for the rest of the week. That was all from that grade. There's more to come. In sixth grade, I was lucky to have her theater class for half the year. Hooray. She immediately makes it her goal to embarrass me and pickle me in class to her miserable heart's content, making me do surprise memorizations, which consisted of being given 30 seconds to memorize a paragraph and recite it in front of the class while doing some ridiculous task. Naturally my parents were not impressed by this and they, with some of the other parents, went in to have a meeting with the principal and the school psychologist about her behavior and might I mention at this point my mental state had started decreasing due to everything she had done to me, going so far as to becoming physically ill when entering her studio.

The school said they would handle it and she was later suspended with pay again. At this point she must have found out that I was tipping the principal off and she gave me extra lines and homework that was never able to be completed due to the quantity of it. She would also make me stay after school during my study hall time to memorize lines for only to be met with F's in every class I ever had of hers. By the 7th grade, this toll this woman had on me was noticeable. Between becoming ill at the sound of her name to avoiding her completely by ducking into classrooms just not to be seen by her, she continued her verbal abuse, calling me nothing and unimportant, and flat- flat tiring me in the hallways only to blame it on me for slowing down. By the end of the year I was actually considering leaving

my second home only for the reason to get away from her. Luckily by that time word was getting out that she was leaving. When this was confirmed with the sixth grade math teacher I actually broke down and cried knowing that it would all be over soon. When the magical day of June 6th rolled around I was ecstatic. Not only because that was the end of school but because it was the end of Laurel. Since then I haven't run into her once but I can only imagine the hell another unlucky student is having to go through right now. And one last thing. I know this story probably isn't as scary as some of the other stories on here, but this is more of a personal experience,

and it also shows exactly how extreme teachers can be without knowing the consequences. This ended back in 2012, but the years before that, a ministry that my sister and I went to with my mom was literally borderlining being a cult. The leader was literally a nightmare. She called Pokemon the Chinese Devil, yes, and clearly stated that while the kids have school, she doesn't really care. After saying that, she also laughed like a maniac. She also gave all the members a book which I won't mention its name because it's out there. They also welcomed in a guy that mistreated younger women and treated him like a god. I know, very wrong. While the girl who came out was completely shut out. She was friends with my older sister so only

she knows of her friend's whereabouts. I don't know what compelled my mom to stay all those years but finally in 2012 she simply sent a text to the leader telling her we would no longer be attending. I'm not sure how the leader responded but to put it simply, that was the end of it. I know that leaving a cult nowadays is very difficult to do. As for my family, we found a new church and are doing a lot better now. I can play Pokemon and watch anime and my parents won't say anything. And my younger sister is doing well mainly because I think she was too young to remember. All I can wonder now is what would have happened if we stayed? In 2015, the leader of this ministry began to face some major health problems and the ministry is no longer around. I'm not entirely sure that she's still alive today. I didn't write this to bad

mouth churches or other beliefs. I simply wanted to make it clear that absolutely anyone can say they're one person, but are completely the opposite. Back in 2015, my family and I moved to a small Alabama town. We previously lived in rural Alabama town before moving to this new town. My mom and stepdad couldn't find any available houses, so we moved to the projects. We're white, by the way. Living in the projects really wasn't so bad. But a lot of shady things happened there after dark. Drug dealing and domestic violence happened just about every week. One of the worst things that have ever happened when we were living there was when an elderly woman got stabbed to death. The elderly woman had just won the lottery and

when one of her neighbors found out, knocked on her door, stabbed her to death and then turned the heat on full blast. I remember the police went around and asked everyone what they knew. Nobody knew anything though. A few days later they caught the person that did that to the elderly woman. I remember driving past the crime scene and seeing that elderly woman's bloody mattress on the side of the road. One night I was sitting on the front porch and eating some raisinets. Then out of nowhere I heard a man say, Hey man, can I chill with you till my homies pick me up? It was a middle-aged black man. He was about 5'8 and height and chubby.

He introduced himself as homie. Not wanting to be mean, I said, Sure, I don't mind. He asked me how I was doing in school and what my grades were like. Throughout our conversation, I saw that he kept reaching for something in his shorts pocket. My gut told me that I was fixing to die, so I ended the conversation and told him, well, I'm going to go inside and take a shower. He replied with, Alright, hit me up sometime. I got some Xan bars. This man made my danger radar go off like a car alarm.

There's one major street gang in this town, and I'm pretty sure that Homie was one of them. A year later, my family moved to a safer town in Georgia. Years ago when I was in college I was driving past a friend's house. The porch light was on so I thought I'd stop in and say hello. I was always known for being a bit of a prankster and I happened to get the idea to freak my friend out. He never locked his door while he was home so I slipped in and then slammed the door shut loudly. Then I heard him in the back room say, hello? Then I backed up against the wall ready to jump out at him when he came to investigate. Then he asks, who's there? With a bit of a quiver in his voice, I kept still and tried to control my laughter.

Next, the lights went out and I didn't hear a sound, so I figured he realized what was going on and decided to reverse the prank. I didn't budge though, I was going to win this round. So I sat there and sat there, not a sound. Sitting in pitch black in a friend's apartment was starting to get to me, but I thought, I'm not letting him win no matter what. After what seemed like a solid five minutes I gave up. I ran to the front door and flipped on the lights and yelled, Brendan? No response.

I walked into the hall and turned on the hall light and then the bedroom light looking for him. No one was there. The bedroom had no windows either. I then called him on his cell phone thinking it would reveal his location. When he answered, he was out of town at a loud party with a bunch of friends. I flipped off the lights and got out of there. Neither of us had an explanation. This happened when I was 19 years old.

I had this friend Maju. We had lunch by ourselves together. One day this guy approached us at lunch. He told us that he was studying in the last high school grade and asked if he could join us. We agreed and we started talking. At first it was normal and we would meet at lunch and would talk but one day he somehow discovered my Instagram account and started sending me messages. His messages were normal at first,

he would just say hi and good night. But one day he sent a text asking me if I was going to our school swimming pool day. I asked why but he didn't answer so I said I was going then and he answered. Oh then I'm going too. I want to see how your hot body looks in a bikini. I was creeped out so I blocked him and texted Maju about what happened and she told me that he asked for nudes from her. She refused then he kept insisting so she sent the pics. I was scared about what he could do with her pictures so I unblocked him and said sorry. The next day he kept sending me texts just talking about my body and how he loved how curvy I was and stuff like that. He did that every day until one day he sent me texts saying that in the last weeks of school he would do something bad involving death and terrible stuff.

I was creeped out but I couldn't block him because he still had my friend's nudes. Some weeks come by and he continued with that psychological abuse. In the last week of school my mother was going to pick me up at 5pm. It was 3.30pm when I was wandering into the school garden. He was hiding on a bush. When I passed by the bush he jumped out, grabbed the phone on my hands and ran away. I searched the whole school but couldn't find him. At my school we have the basement area that is locked out for students but there is a window open that some students go in there to do stuff.

So I go to the basement window to go in the basement and see my phone on the ground at the corner of the basement. When I pick up my phone, he jumps out of a box and starts bashing a piece of wood on my head until I pass out. When I woke up, I was naked and covered with my friend's jacket and my friend crying over me and the dean and police on the basement door. I tried to get up but I couldn't, the pain was too much. After that I got in an ambulance with my friend and she told me, I got a text from my phone from him. He said that he would hurt you and sent a picture of you naked with blood on the ground

passed out. Then I recognized the school basement so I called the police and told them what happened and drove to the school. When I got here the officer was waiting for me, we ran called the police and told them what happened and drove to the school. When I got here the officer was waiting for me. We ran to the basement and he was doing terrible things to you. The officer ran at him and handcuffed him and he had a bag with duct tape and a knife. Then I saw you.

I checked for vital signs and I covered you with my jacket. After this, I don't know what happened with the boy, but I changed schools and never saw him again. So, there are some strange occurrences that I can't help but feel are connected, and I'm actually genuinely afraid now. It started around February when I was sitting by a window one night playing with my dog while my boyfriend was at school. I got a phone call from an unknown number, and I picked up to hear your stereotypical scary phone call, heavy breathing and I hung up. A few minutes later I get another call from a different number with the same area code as mine so I pick up again and I hear, I see you, I know where you're at and I panic, hanging up and blocking the number. I locked all the doors and ran upstairs and called my boyfriend. He convinced me that it was probably some middle schoolers doing some prank phone calls and did not worry. This continues sporadically over the

course of a couple of weeks but I don't think much of it since my boyfriend was probably right. Fast forward to April. I live in a gated community and there's not a lot of grass to walk my dog on so I have to go across the street to a small area for him to do his business when I don't take him for a real walk in a wooded area outside my community. My dog is a black pit bull dutch shepherd mix and when stretched out on my bed he's longer than my five foot self so he can be a little intimidating to people who don't know him. I have also had him professionally trained and so he normally is extremely obedient. While walking him he kept pulling towards my car, parked in the parking area in front

of the grass and barking. We adopted him from a shelter and I think all of the barking there is why he almost never barks now so this was very strange behavior for him. I decided to take him inside and try again later if he wasn't going to listen so I'm walking back up the driveway when he yanks me to the other way and his hackles are raised, growling and barking. I turn and pull him with me and I see a man crouch behind my car with his phone held in front of his face taking pictures of me with his flash on. The car next to mine belonged to my landlord so it's not like he was getting out

of his car or anything. I screamed and ran inside, dragging my 90 pound dog with me and locked all doors and windows and once again called my boyfriend crying not knowing what to do. He brought it to my attention that while very creepy, it's not illegal in my state to take pictures and videos of someone without their permission. Because of this, I didn't call the police. Fast forward again to two weeks ago. For some background information, there are parking lots between every six or seven houses in my community. I had come home from work late and the lot in front of the strip houses mine is located in had filled up so I parked in one of the ones further down the block. At 10am the next morning I'm walking to my car when I hear gravel crunching behind me. I turn around and there is an early 2000s Mercedes E320 crawling behind me very slowly

with the brights on. I also notice that there is no front license plate but then I realize that I'm walking directly next to a strip of houses and I think I'm blocking this person from getting into their driveway so I walk a little faster. The car keeps pace with me and follows maybe three feet behind me until I get to the other parking lot and it stalls as I get into my car and drive away. I mention it to my boyfriend when we get home and I ask if I'm being paranoid about it and he agrees that it was very strange and told me to park in the driveway if there was no parking in front of our house

and he would move it for me. I feel it important to note that we had never seen this car in the development before and we would have noticed because my boyfriend used to have a 1996 model of the same car so we would have pointed because my boyfriend used to have a 1996 model of the same car, so we would have pointed it out to each other. No one knew it was moved into the development either in several months,

so either this car belonged to a guest of someone who lives here, or it stays in someone's garage for the most part. This past Thursday, I was again taking my dog to the grassy area in front of her house when he keeps pulling in one direction and sniffing. I figured he had just to do his business and smelled something interesting so I allowed him to do so. He leads me to the end of the parking lot in front of the grass and it's the car. I started to panic and I walk him around to the back of the car and took a quick side picture of the back license plate as I rushed us inside. This car had a Florida license plate with six digits, the last three being letters.

I don't know what's standard for Florida but in my state DMV issued plates of seven digits and the last four numbers which leads me to believe that it's a custom plate. The car didn't move and myself nor my boyfriend noticed anyone go in or out of it. When I came back from running errands this morning the car was gone. I don't know what to do. Any advice or input would be welcome. I've always been very skeptical of ghost sightings because I've never seen anything and haven't to this day. So what my cousins did was terrible. It still makes me mad thinking about it. So the younger brother was playing around with their webcam and their old lousy computer. He took a picture of his sister at the dinner table and

in the picture you can clearly see different people that are not supposed to be there. My cousin who is the oldest of all of them claims to be sensitive to this stuff. She was always tormented by ghost kids in their trailer house that they used to live in. She would always see a duende which in Mexico were the spirits of children that embody this dwarf gnome looking thing. They look like a little person or a little kid, but have the face of an old person with beady eyes, so I've heard. Their eyes look like how a cat's eyes would, round and close together. They supposedly sound like little kids too and are quite mischievous. So apparently they will reside where a child has died. This thing would always visit her at night and wake her up and would be standing at the end

of her bed playing with her toes. She said he would tickle them and laughed. The first time it happened she thought it was her brother messing with her so she appeared to look who it was and was horrified by the thing. So yeah, she'd seen that thing, and she'd see a boy crying in her room and other things I don't remember. Now the picture they showed me was a picture of my cousins at the dinner table, and the oldest walking towards the camera. Beside her standing was this white girl with blonde locks and a dress. Were Mexican black hair, tanned skin.

The ghost kids in the picture were obviously Caucasian children and were a little transparent and blurred. There was also a baby in diapers crawling under the dinner table and I can't remember if the third kid was sitting on the table or standing beside it. And I was so amazed because I knew for a fact that they couldn't have photoshopped it. They were not tech savvy at all. They used to think that their Wi-Fi worked like data and if you used it a lot it would run out so I'm saying I saw it with my two eyes. It sucks that ghosts always decide to be shown when people were taking pictures with crappy low-res cameras.

My brother tried emailing the picture to his phone so we could post it somewhere but it was always corrupted. My cousin later gave her laptop away to another cousin because it stopped working correctly and apparently all the memory got wiped. It's honestly terrible. The one time we had real proof that made the child within me believe in something crazy got deleted. I'm a female and when I was 18 years old I had a friend who became very ill and couldn't go to school anymore for some months. To make things easier for her once she would come back I agreed to give her private lessons and I copied math problems for her to solve. For the day of our first appointment she drew a little map for me since I've never been at her village before and the way to her house seemed to be complicated.

No problem I thought when I got off the train and looked at the map. Besides me there was another boy who went off the train at that station and we went both in the same direction. My eyes fixated on the paper. I crossed roads and followed a pedestrian path to a school building. It was only then that I noticed that the boy from before was still ahead of me, but I didn't give it any thought. When both of us took the road around the school building, I found it a funny coincidence that we seemingly went to the same neighborhood, but still didn't think much about it. I concentrated on the map again to figure out where to go next. When I looked up again, I noticed that he gave me a quick, skeptical glance over his shoulders and hastily looked away again. Then he started to walk faster than he did before.

His reaction perplexed me for a moment because that's something I would expect from a woman on a lonely street during the night and not from a boy who is at least a head taller than me. I didn't even wear a hoodie that day or any other clothing that could make me look suspicious, therefore I came to the conclusion that I was probably mistaken in terms of his cautious behavior and concentrated on the map once more. Ironically, the map led me to the same road as him again, and his glances became more and more obvious. I wished for my friend's home to turn up pretty quickly to put an end to this bizarre situation, but when I arrived at the neighborhood, the situation became even more awkward. He headed toward her house as well.

Before he went inside, he looked at me over his shoulders, saw that I moved towards the house and hurried to go inside and slam the door behind him. I don't know what he thought when I rang the doorbell right after. He probably thought I was a crazy stalker who even had the nerve to follow him to his house. The door was flung open and he yelled at me asking me what I wanted. Embarrassed I answered in a very squeaky voice that I was there to see his sister and tried to give him an apologetic smile which probably looked very awkward. He just stared at me in disbelief even after my friend came to bring me to her room. I told her the story and we could still laugh about it but her brother still avoided

me during every one of my visits. If you're reading this dear brother of my friend I'm really sorry that I unintentionally creeped you out that day but I can assure you I'm truly not year old male at the time of this story. Sometimes when I go a long time without talking to anyone my voice comes out quite weird when I finally do talk. Most of the time I remember to clear my throat or something but sometimes I'll just start talking and it will sound weird. So one such occasion I was riding the metro home to College Park, Maryland. I worked in DC at the time and my ride home was usually around an hour. On the train there was a cute girl. I try not to constantly look at girls on the train because I don't want to make anyone feel uncomfortable. It seemed though like every

time I did glance at the girl she looked right back at me immediately afterward. I was hoping that she kept looking at me because she thought I was cute or something too, but was worried that due to the coincidence that every time she checked to see if I was looking at her, I was, and that it seemed like I was just constantly staring at her. I finally got to my stop around 11pm. I was the only person that got off the train at the stop, except for the cute girl. At the College Park metro station there was a large parking garage where I had parked my car. I had gone to work late in the day so my car was parked on the fourth floor. I got onto the elevator and noticed the cute girl was already in it with me. She pressed the number two. I thought to myself that she must be extremely lazy or tired to take the elevator one floor. As if she read my mind she answered saying it's not that I'm lazy it's just that the stairs can be pretty scary at night.

Now this is where my inactive throat thing comes in and trust me when I say I have absolutely no idea why I said this. I turned to her and said in a very gargley low voice, this elevator can be pretty scary place sometimes too and then kind of got a tickle in my throat and started clearing it but it could have sounded like grunting. At that moment the elevator got to her floor and she just booked it. If you're out there cute girl, I had no intention of doing anything to you that night and I'm very, very sorry. This happened a few hours ago upon Upon waking up and thinking about it, I realized that I most likely just scared the crap out of some poor old man. To start though, you have to understand the situation I recently found myself in. My beloved cat, we'll call him Billy, went missing about two weeks ago.

I've plastered my neighborhood in posters, begging for anyone who sees him to contact me. Today, after weeks of silence, I got a call from a woman claiming to have spotted Billy by the graveyard behind my house. So, naturally, I got dressed and headed out to search for him. But again, some background information is needed. This weekend I came down with an awful cold. I've been sick for a few days and my nose has gotten so dry, sometimes it just pours blood. My hair is matted and my voice currently sounds like a transgendered Shirley Temple. My fever has me constantly drenched in sweat, so overall, I'm a mess. After walking the perimeter of the graveyard in my neighborhood, I decided to walk through the graveyard and search for him there. So I strolled in, calling, Billy!

Over and over again. As I got deeper into the cemetery, I came across a car. It seemed to be some old man who was dropping off flowers for someone. I just kept walking, calling out for my missing cat. As I got closer to the man, I noticed he was staring at me and backing away. I found his behavior kind of strange but being sick, exhausted and solely focused on finding my cat I ignored it and just kept walking. As soon as I passed him though I heard a car door slam and by the time I turned around to see if he was okay he was speeding out of the cemetery.

I finished my walk, went home and fell asleep. It was only upon waking up that I realized how creepy that must have been for the old man. He was dropping off flowers in a secluded graveyard in the middle of the afternoon when some girl, drenched in sweat with matted hair and blood dripping out of her nose starts coming towards him, yelling, Billy, come Billy. Over and over again with a voice so deep she sounds like a demon. So to the man I creeped out in the graveyard today, let's meet some time so I can try and explain what just happened. This was maybe five years ago in college. My three friends and I were all at the bars doing whatever.

We were four normal looking guys. It must not have been super fun because we all decided to leave. It was probably around midnight, not super late. There were plenty of people still in the bars and should have been at least some people or cars on the back road, though I can't remember noticing any. The way back from the bar to the campus is pretty much a straight shot up a hill past a few shops. We make a sharp left out of the bar and we see this guy who looked pretty angry. I don't think he noticed us because he was too busy beating the crap out of a green

electrical box. We stopped to watch. I'm not about to get close to a guy thrashing an inanimate object like that. He kicked the box so hard that one of the hinges pops the metal cover loose and he falls right on his butt. We laugh and may have been close enough for him to hear us, but I like to think he didn't hear. We keep our distance of two to three light posts behind him. Then he starts walking up the hill back to campus. At this point we're thinking, well, that's the way we gotta go and we don't want to catch up to that guy. I suggest that we should just maintain the same distance and coincidentally follow him home, or at least to the point where he has to take a turn somewhere we don't.

So we start following this guy up the hill. The whole time he is very, very, very angry. He's mumbling and kind of growling to himself. I'm guessing he probably just broke up with a girl or maybe saw her cheating on him or something like that. As he was angrily walking he would periodically stop to beat something up like a light post. He may have looked back at us once or twice. When he stopped we stopped and just kept an eye on him. He walked past a closed shop and couldn't help but try to intimidate his reflection in the window. He pump faked a few punches. Again, he stopped to

do this so we could stop to watch him. We walked a little further, and then he decided to actually commit to physically and metaphorically beating himself up and punch a window with his reflection in it. He hurts his hand and then turns to look at us since we had some sort of noisy reaction to that. We're not close enough for him to confront, but we're not far enough for him to think we didn't see that. We're about halfway up the hill at this point. This is where the fear starts sinking in. He begins to start looking back at us more frequently.

Same deal though, if he stops, we stop. We talk about how we're not afraid of this guy. It's four against one and he's obviously out of it. We decide he's not a threat and just keep doing what we've been doing. We know it's creepy but what else are we gonna do? He never yells at us or comes towards us. In his head, he must have known that he can't go confront four guys who've been following him this whole time. He turns around and picks up his walking pace. We pick up our walking pace to keep up. He looks back and sees this and goes into a good power walk. We match his pace again. I'm certain at this point that he thinks we're gonna mug him.

We're almost up the hill and to the left is some housing. Maybe he lives in that neighborhood because he takes a hard left. We don't live in that neighborhood and need to go straight a little longer but I'm like, you know what guys, let's just turn up here and see what he does. We do. He's standing down the street watching to see what we do, probably hoping we just walk by and then reassure himself he was just being paranoid. Unfortunately, he sees us, makes a turn towards him. He goes into an all-out sprint away from us, cutting through yards and disappears. It was fun while it lasted, but we weren't going to go sprinting after this scared guy and we just continued on our way home. When I read the stories here, most of them are generally creepy dudes, but maybe sometimes that atmosphere is what's really

creepy. Every now and again I think back on this guy and wonder if he thought he was going to get robbed or something worse that night and how he narrowly escaped. Nope, just some jerks having fun while walking home. I'm a white male, age 22. I live in the country. Basically nothing important goes on around me. I live with my wife and her father in a quaint little house painted on the back roads. This story takes place before I ever met my wife, before I had even thought of finding her. I had a terrible best friend who

was not terrible at the time. He was stealing my stuff from behind my back and that's another story for another day. As I said before, this guy was my best friend and I his. I was also a useless bit of existence in this stage of my life. I worked at a call center, came home to smoke and eat and repeated it the next day. For a time before, I didn't even have a job and would just lounge around the house and hang out with my best friend. It was in this period of time that this story takes place. I do believe me and Johnny had just gotten done smoking a J and we were doing something related to that. Either we had just gone down to spend our last dollar fifty, us both not having jobs, on polar pops, giant sugary drinks for 69 cents because we had

cotton mouth, or we had gotten some food from McDonald's because we had the munchies, or we had just gotten a ten sack because all we did was smoke. Anyway, anyone who knows about living in the country will tell you that almost every back road intersects with every other back road. As such, me and my friend had memorized all the roads around our area. There were at least 50 ways to get back to our house from the closest town or city and we were very familiar with all of them. Why wouldn't you remember when all you do is smoke and cruise all day? Anyways, I can't remember if it was a guy or a girl, a truck or a car, but someone had made me mad. Late at night, coming back to our house, we had pulled out of a parking lot and someone immediately from the opposite side cut me off and went right in front of me.

I was never one to road rage. I always thought to myself, what if they had a gun? I can't take that risk, and it is why I tell my wife to suppress her heavy road rage just for safety. I grew red in the face and could not hold it in anymore. Luck having it, I was going the exact same way he was going, and as I told you, there's 50 million ways to get back to my house from this town. So, instead of blaring my horn, I just tailgated him. I made sure I stayed close enough to shove my headlights down his eye holes and I followed him every single turn. It added about five minutes to my travel time. I'm pretty sure he knew. It looked like he was going out of his way. I probably followed him for about a half

an hour. He just seemed to take all the roads we were going through by chance. At first, it was out of anger. I would only do it for a couple of streets and that would be that. Shine my headlights on him because he almost caused me to flip into a ditch. Seriously, you couldn't wait ten seconds to go after me. How screwed is that? Thinking back, I'm sure he was in a truck. I was in a Cavalier. People out here with their trucks drive like morons and act like they're the only

ones on the road and I was sick of it. But a couple of streets turned into about nine or ten. He lived really close to my home, about ten minutes away. Honestly, it just turned into a game. Me and Johnny agreed that as long as he turns down a street that we can also technically take to go home, not backtracking, then we would also follow him. He or she probably noticed too. They would speed up, veer around the corner, and would veer up after that. If they ever got out, what was I even going to say? Probably just flip them off and tell them they were idiots and almost made me wreck. Anyway they never did stop but eventually ended up going

in the opposite direction we were going. Bea and Johnny thought it was hilarious and we talked about it for the rest of the night while smoking and eating some really good food I think. I'm not particularly sorry for what I did. I do feel guilty because if it would have happened to me, I would have been scared out of my mind. But I also would not go and cut someone off going 45 and almost causing their car to go off the road. I have more respect than that. Although maybe this story says otherwise. If those people were generally fearful for their life, I am sorry. But you should learn how to drive better. At the very least, by the actions

I observed that night, I don't think they felt guilty or fearful at all. They knew what they were doing when they cut me off, and they knew I was riding them and following them because they were a terrible driver. And for those of you who claim I'm an awful person or something that's the degree, well, that's just your opinion, man. I'm not going to tell you I'm a good or bad guy. You can make that decision for yourself. We all do stupid things. This happened when I was either 17 or 18. I was technically the creep in this situation, even though I never meant any harm. Before I begin this story, I need to point out that I have a few minor mental disabilities, so sometimes I can't read a situation for what it is until it's too late.

God knows I've suffered for that multiple times in my life. I used to work at a grocery store. It was rather large so I had quite a few co-workers I barely knew. One day I was working a rush when I saw a woman talking with one of my co-workers who I'll call Mike. They seemed to know each other rather well and I could have sworn I recognized her from one of the departments so I assumed she was a co-worker on maternity leave. The reason I say maternity leave is because she was holding a baby boy who looked like he was just a few weeks old.

The woman came to my register to ring up her groceries when she was done talking to Mike. I greeted the woman with a smile and asked her the typical questions like, how are you? Do you want this in a bag? I looked again at the baby she was still cradling. I've always been good at taking care of kids and have helped out at camps, daycares and regular babysitting jobs countless times in the past. So I asked the typical questions about her baby as well like what's his name? How old is he? When I finished ringing her up I told her to have a good day and that was that. I later found out from Mike that she wasn't a co-worker at all just a regular at the store. I figured that was okay

there were a lot of those several of which I knew and she seemed nice enough. I saw her shopping with her family quite often after that and like with every regular I knew I always offered a smile and a wave when I saw them. One Saturday, I had just finished my shift and was walking out the door to my car when my mom called me and asked me to pick up some hot dogs. They were all the way at the back of the store and I was at the front, but I rolled my eyes and began to walk back the way I had come. I cut through one of the aisles to get there faster, and I came across a group of four people taking up the entire aisle. I recognized them as the woman and her family. I didn't want to

bother them so I tried my best to walk around them but they were going incredibly slow and no matter what direction I tried to go I couldn't get around them. Looking back I probably should have just turned around and walked through a different aisle but I got to the hot dogs before that even crossed my mind. The family resumed walking and I got the hot dogs, paid for them and left the store. I worked again the next day and of course the woman and her family came to shop again. I smiled and waved like always and continued to work. About 20 minutes later my manager asked if he could talk to me. I didn't think much of it, thinking he just needed my help with cleaning the bathrooms or something and I followed him to the

back room. When we got there, my supervisor was there too and I was instantly confused and nervous. To make a long story short, they told me that a woman had reported me for stalking her and trying to hurt her baby. I still remember feeling like I had just been slapped in the face as I knew instantly who they were talking about even though I had never laid a hand on the woman or her baby. I explained my side of the situation also making sure to mention the events of the day before when I was shopping. Luckily I had known both my manager and the supervisor ever since I had started working at the store so they believed me and chalked it up to the woman simply misreading the situation.

The rest of that day I felt like I was going to throw up. I had come close to losing my job and been accused of being a criminal and I was technically still a kid. Even though I had been assured by my managers and later my parents that I had done nothing wrong, I still spent a few good months after that constantly fearing that someone else with a baby would think of me in that way, to the point where I couldn't even look at another child. I've since gotten over those feelings, but over the years I've learned to be more careful with what I say or do. Luckily, for the rest of the time I worked

in that store, I never saw that woman or family again. The First World War started in the summer of 1914, and what would follow over the next four years would so dramatically change the world that nobody would ever forget it. Up to that point, it was the deadliest war humanity has experienced, and up to today, we still live amongst the fields and valleys of those that fought in the critically acclaimed Great War. These are the stories of the soldiers who were willing to be slaughtered, not only for their countries, but for their families and friends. My name is Jacob Hayes and I live in Dauphinholm, UK. This isn't a story about me, but one about my great-grandfather that fought as an artilleryman in World War I.

I'm going to summarize the story according to how he wrote it in his diary. He took it with him to the war and wrote in it weekly. He has a few interesting but brutal stories to tell, but the one I wish to share still baffles me today, so without further ado, let's begin. Date, the 7th of August 1914. I have reacquainted with my QF-18 Pounder artillery piece for the past two days, and am currently in the process of loading the heavy devil onto our convoy that sets off for France soon. I'm planning on writing a letter to my mother as soon as our expedition reaches France. I don't want her to worry about me after all, for I know my training will certainly help me in this war we just declared on the Imperial German Empire.

Date 14th August 1914. Our expeditionary force dispatched for France on the 9th August and today we finally landed in France. We now prepare to join the French artillerymen along the border of Belgium to help repel the German advance. I personally think that the rest of my mates and I are already prepared to fight, but one thing is for sure, we don't know what to expect when we get to that piece of land. August 21st, 1914. After three days of hiking through

towns and cities in France, we reached the French and Belgian line, which stretched from Alsace-Lorraine in the east to Mons in southern Belgium, and what boosted not only my morale, but my matey's morale as well, is that we were greeted with open arms among many French and Belgian people. We got our artillery pieces a few days ago, and yesterday we situated them a few kilometers back from our defensive line, about 5 to be exact. August 28th, 1914. We received word on the 23rd of August from a Belgian runner that a German cavalry charge began on our defensive line, so we had our coordinates received via planner and began to open fire repeatedly on the destination chosen by the planner. My job that day was to load and unload shells inside a

QF 18-pounder field gun that my mates and I nicknamed Shelly. It wasn't until the last shell our team fired that we saw what the Germanic artillery did to our line. We saw doctors, or might I say medics, carrying away soldiers on stretchers. Some were disfigured and some of them I spotted were as red as the corpse of Christ Jesus as depicted in my church. The poor souls wheeled away never to be seen by any of us here again. God please look after those men in heaven for they're more brave and done so much more than I ever could. I soon after looked at our artillery line in which explosive residue from imperial German artillery shells surrounded our position or scored direct hits on some of our pieces. Some men in our line were in red meshed pieces and I vomited twice that day and I prayed that for the next day we wouldn't suffer through one death in our force.

However, we did receive word from a runner that the Imperial German Cavalry charge was pushed back. The next day we were repelling a Germanic foot soldier charge and we managed to push them back but not without suffering some casualties of our own. This cycle repeated for a few days until today where both a foot soldier and cavalry charge ensued and we barely managed to hold our ground. I can't get this soldier's face out of my mind, for he handed me a canteen of water before his head was severed by a shell. It was absolutely awful, but we still hold. However, I don't know what tomorrow will hold or even next week when I write again. The 4th of September, 1914. I don't have much time but we have been pushed back after three repeated

attacks from the imperial German forces and we began retreating to the border in between France and Belgium. It took a while and the enemy was right behind our tails harassing us as we fled but I just finished praying to our heavenly father for our fellow mates and I have just witnessed a miracle. I don't care if I'm called crazy for if I am I'll just have my mates back me up because we just saw angels come down from the clouds and shooting blazing arrows among the imperial German forces. We cheered and prayed to God for we knew he was on our side. We thanked him and were able to flee this entire week without suffering a single casualty. As for today, we are almost to France and I can't wait to get there.

My name is Cyril Helm and let me begin by saying that it all began so cheerfully, with gorgeous weather in which the troops were itching to join the great adventure abroad, for it was impossible not to be excited. Now, if you were a part of my generation, you would understand why we were excited. It had nothing to do with patriotism or bravery for our country, but it was a chance to be more than the kids we used to be. We didn't realize until a few months later how long and brutal the war was going to be. Most of us, like myself, were still teenagers and we thought this was a chance to grow up,

but I now reflect on this as a poor choice we had made. My experience may be hard to tell due to my mentioning of our ages at the time, so please bear with me. So as our 2nd Battalion of the King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry began to set sail from Dublin for Le Havre on an old cargo ship, the SS Bouteshire, on 14th of August 1914, a chorus of hoots and sirens filled the riverside air. Soon after a large crowd bid us a noisy farewell, for we were now on our way, it felt like the realization of the dream of every young soldier. When we headed out into the open sea with our course set towards land's end, a historical message is read out to all those on deck from King George V. You are leaving home to fight for the safety and honor of my empire,

and I pray God to bless you and guard you and bring you back victorious. Just two and a half months later I would be writing, in daily diary format, in my standard issue army book 129. During that time I was holed up in a farm in northeastern France. I have chosen this spot as my main aid post, just outside a tiny village called Richebourg-Alvaux. The battalion I came here with was already severely depleted. The retreat from Mons in August and early September and the subsequent race to the sea has taken a terrible toll. Now that I think about it, hell would be a tame word described what we went through so far. On the 27th of October,

German shells were raining down around the farm just a hundred yards behind one of our first constructed British fire trenches and I was struggling to cope with the wounded as they flooded in. In the garden behind the farm British and German dead were laid out waiting to be buried as soon as the shelling died down in the evening. Many of those shells fell in our frontline trenches causing awful casualties. Men were buried alive whilst others were just dug out in time and brought to unable to stand with their backs half broken. My cellar was soon packed but I couldn't put any wounded upstairs for at any minute the place could have been blown up. My work was dressing the injured and it was so relentless and intense that at times it took my mind off the horrors unfolding outside.

But every so often when I would pause to listen the noise almost shattered my nerves. Unimaginable is how I would describe my feelings at such moments. At times, there was nothing my mind knew more than to sit and listen to the shells outside and wonder how long it will be before one comes and finds my hiding place. Surprisingly, the farm survived the German shell fire of the 27th of October, but the next day at noon it started up again. Somehow that morning I found time to write a letter home to my parents. I thanked them for a thermos flask they sent me through the military post,

and I wrote how sorry I was not to have written for a few days. The reason I told them was because of the rather trying situation the battalion had found itself in. On the 28th, we were experiencing more than a nightmare, for the crumps were coming just over and then short until 01200, when there was a blinding flash and a roar. The next thing I knew was that I was leaning up against a wall in pitch darkness with the air full of dust and acrid fumes. A shell had bursted by the cellar where I was working. Six lay dead about the cellar and many wounded. One poor RAMC orderly who had been standing next to me when the shell burst was lying dead with his chest smashed in by a huge fragment of shell.

Now that's something I don't like to even think or talk about. The next day we saw less shelling but for me it was no less painful. By this time, eleven weeks into their war, I and the quartermaster who worked well behind the front line were the only two officers remaining from those who had set sail from Dublin in August. 300 men had died in the previous nine days and it was horrible. It's appalling seeing one's friend picked off one after the other and I can only marvel now that I survived. At times when I realized all those my pals had gone, I nearly went off my head. But if it wasn't for my family being my link to sanity, I would probably have been shell-shocked like the rest of the boys. The next day, 29th of October,

I was wounded and unable to rejoin the fight, so was sent back home and greeted by my family with open arms. For those who see this, I hope you understand how much the boys that served with me did for our motherland of Britain, and I pray that you give them your thanks, for they have given the biggest sacrifice that man could give, their lives. My father was known in the service documents as Francis Harold McLork, but as we knew him, he was Frank. As my mother knew him, he had a secret sort of name that she had given him early in the war when they first met, and it was Jamie, James, or Jim. Sometimes people get confused about who this man is. He signs his war letters as Jimmy when he's writing to her, but in fact most of his letters, at least to his family at home, are signed by Frank. He was born in Moosomin, Saskatchewan, which was then Moosomin Northwest Territories in 1890.

He moved to Saskatoon and then quickly to Winnipeg as part of the pre-going overseas experience of getting trained to be a medic in Canada for the war. He joined as a private in 1915 and was quickly made into a corporal, then swiftly into a lance corporal during training, in which gave him an extra ten cents in pay. When he arrived to France, he said he had to somehow supervise the soldiers and French citizens in the sickbay, and they were all very sick with fits of flu, bronchitis, and pneumonia, and so forth. Then, of course, his mother was worried about him, so she sent him a letter to see if he's using the right kind of medicine and taking care of himself. He replied, I'm so sorry should I have caused you any fear by even mentioning my position as a sick supervisor.

I quite understand if you were worried and also any rumor of our team being quarantined which would have had you considerably more worried. We haven't been quarantined as of yet and I don't for a moment believe we're going to be and we've heard lots of rumors when we'll be sent over to the front of course. He then goes on to say that he's absolutely delighted with the group of men that he's been working with. Eventually he got to see his cousin enter the bay due to a case of pneumonia. His cousin was with a Scottish division and while they saw each other there they would compare notes between one another. Upon reading one of his cousin's letters, he questioned him about the Canadian division he was serving along the side of during the Second Battle of Ypres by asking him, Are the Canadians really undisciplined? And his cousin's response to that was,

Yes, they were of course. They weren't the kind to stand around with parade stuff, but when they have to work to do, and they see the reason for it, they really don't complain at all. For when we went over the top, they didn't really complain, for they had the intelligence to realize that this is necessary work, and as long as the next man does his share, they do not kick at all and I love them for it. I honestly think they're as good as any there are and better than 90% of us in our division. His cousin speaks like this all the way through about the people he's worked with and how he really clearly enjoyed them, but he eventually died of his pneumonia for it became too severe and that messed Frank up a good bit. He sent home a field postcard to his family in Saskatchewan on the 10th of November 1915 and by scratching out the statements they did not apply to him he was able to show his family he was quite well.

However, he had to tell them the bad news about his cousin's death. Soon after, Frank was sent to the front not before he was promoted to the rank of second lieutenant on the 9th of January, 1916. After this, Frank sent another letter to his family in which he described how he was promoted and then how complicated and difficult tasks involved in building and maintaining trenches were, for as a second lieutenant he was responsible for overseeing the process. However he admired his men for their hard work but he wouldn't see many of them again for they all would eventually go over the top because the trench he was helping to build was at the Somme river valley. He didn't

talk much about that battle for it was one of the deadliest battles of the war as I found out later in my own life and the only thing he could ever tell me about the battle was that he was wounded in his left arm by shrapnel and was taken to a field hospital after being brought back to his own trench line by one of his fellow servicemen. Upon his arrival to receive amputation he commented on the many from his unit who have been killed by sadly announcing, many mothers hearts are breaking for their boys who will never return. His treatment was long and it wouldn't be without a strong argument to stay with his brigade for he did lose an arm and there weren't too many ways to fight with one arm. However, he just wasn't going to let that stand in his way, so he vouched and I quote, to serve and defend my brothers in arms until the German

army gives this war up or we breach the Hindenburg line or even Berlin itself and make them give up. He was promoted to the rank of first lieutenant on the 9th of June 1918 upon returning to the front and he eventually led his brigade in the Hundred Days Offensive all the way to the armistice. I am going to finish Frank's legacy as a soldier with a quote from one of his last letters he sent to his family. This one was written about the brigade he had led the charge with during the Hundred Days Offensive and eventually that same man, my father, led those men all the way through to the armistice. I would not swap the brigade for any other in the world and I honestly believe that these fellow countrymen of mine are as good as To my dearest family, Toronto, 14th of January, 1916.

I left Ridgetown, Ontario in January 1916 at the age of 19 to join the 48th Highlanders, so Lawrence and I went down to the armories last night. Just as we got there, we met a Highlanders, so Lawrence and I went down to the armories last night. Just as we got there, we met a Highlander officer. I told him we wanted to join the 134th and he said, come right along with me. Suddenly he looked up at me and said, say how tall are you? We can't take any more under 5'5". I told him I couldn't quite do it but I showed him a letter which I had received from Colonel Donald saying that if a man was specially well built he would stretch a point in his favor. Well he said you certainly deserve some consideration under the circumstances

and you're well built all right. He took my measure and I just went 5'4 and a half but he let my hair stand up and it just stood high enough to touch the scale at 5'5. Well, he thought that would do if I could pass examination but the worst blow came this morning when I went down to be examined. When I entered the room another officer said, Say, how tall are you? I answered quite confidently, 5'5". He wouldn't allow for my hair and with my low-heeled shoes on, I just touched 5'3 and 3'4". See that? He said. I'm sorry, but we can't take you. You're too short. My heart dropped right down to my boots and I thought it was all over, but I produced the letter again. The officer took me in to see the

commander. He joked about the matter for a while but finally he said that he'd put a pair of high heeled shoes on me and he would add my height to my friends and divide it by two and make up for my deficiency in that way. In my bare feet I stand five two and a half. Rome 28th of November 1917. I made my first trip into the trenches at Vimy Ridge and for mud that piece of line had them all beat. I fired my first shot the second night just after midnight. I got the fellow I shot at just in front of our wire. I won't forget the feeling as I pressed the trigger that night and I hadn't got over it when I wrote. On the 27th of February, 14 frits raided our machine gun post and yours truly was on sentry. It was an awfully dark night. Of course it was too late to fire the

gun, but some way or another I managed to alarm the rest of the crew and we beat them off. The joke of it all was I received a bunch of daily mails from home a few weeks later and on the front page of one was a full account of the whole thing. I bet mother dreamed that little Leslie was the sentry she was reading about. The second time I went over was at Vimy on the 9th of April. That was a great day for the Canucks and it was then I had my first real go at Fritz. However, I wasn't able to see if we had reached their lines for my left leg was blown off by shrapnel. But don't worry, for I have a ton of wrappings on it and the doc says I'll be out soon. So you see, we've had quite an exciting time of it all year and

I consider myself extremely lucky to still be breathing, and hopefully Mom will cry for my war is over, and I'll be coming home as soon as the doc has finished with my wound. Wishing you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. I remain yours sincerely, Leslie I am Dr. Charles James McNeil Willoughby and I graduated from medicine in 1916 from Toronto Medical School. I was very anxious to join the war effort so I joined the British Medical Corps in 1916 in England and was sent in the hospital ship Châtel-Arabe to Basra in order to serve in the Mesopotamian campaign. I had not one type of training in tropical diseases. Malaria and dysentery,

both amoebic and bacillary, were common but the treatments for those sicknesses were disappointing and casualties were heavy from such diseases. I finally got to France in 1917, first of all on hospital ship. From the hospital ship I went into a ground situation. I don't like to talk about the trench warfare during our advance in France but I recall seeing a famous bizarre painted Richthofen circus then under the leadership of Hermann Goering. It was flying very low over our dressing station which was a shed near a farmhouse. We were using this place as our temporary battalion headquarters. The flying circus was apparently on a scouting mission to see how far we had advanced before evening. This suspicion was soon to be confirmed, for on my return to the dressing station, I found no patients needing attention, so I went over to the old adjoining farmhouse for evening mess.

It was then that the shelling began from the German batteries in our area. Unfortunately, one large shell landed on the dressing station which caused it to be completely demolished and my orderly who was there did not survive. The roof collapsed and that registered a nice dent on my helmet but I was otherwise unharmed. Everybody thought everything in warfare is subject to various dangerous experiences and I readily admit that I was a coward when it came to real shell fire. How some of the more seasoned officers and men treated the wine and the bang of shells bursting around with callous indifference was beyond my comprehension. Until I learned their philosophy was that you never hear a shell with your number on it. Those with the wine and the

bang are marked for someone else. I wrote often to my family while I was overseas. I was the censor for my unit so I was very careful and not only my own letters but with everyone else's. However, I did manage to communicate well with my family for I wrote a letter to my father on the 19th of July in 1918 wishing him a happy birthday and told him that morale among the men of my unit was high. The experience of the war has never left me and I really felt dearly for the freedom and peacealion of the Black Watch in 1916. He explained how he came down from his postal office, which is where he worked, when he spotted officers who fought at the Plains of Abraham, and they wrote a letter that contained a star when my father enlisted, in which the letter stated that they had taken on a recruit

of historic connections. My dad figured they did that for publicity to get people to join the army. After applying he served at Linz, Passchendaele and Combré. He talked very very little about the war however he did manage to tell me some stories about his time in it. The first story he told me was that his battalion was watching a dogfight over the trenches and the German plane was brought down which boosted the morale of the entire battalion he was in. Upon going to investigate the wreckage, they found the pilot of the plane was alive and crying. His platoon then captured him and my father never knew what became of him. Later he told me about the 73rd's first attack at Vimy Ridge,

which was a march trench raid that occurred after the dogfight. The 73rd's went over the top and got beaten up pretty badly. During his explanation of the raid was when he told me about the one and only death he was willing to share with anyone and I can understand why he only explained one of them. I still picture how he described this poor soul's death in my dreams to this day. He explained how the soldier in front of him was cut in half by an artillery shell and his small intestine landed on my father's rifle. My father always cried when he told us this. The 73rd's charge was pushed back

and later in the night, when they were coming back to their own trench, they could hear soldiers shouting, help 73rd, help 73rd. They're all tied up in the barbed wire and the 73rd battalion both couldn't and were forbidden to get to them and I know that bothered my father immensely. His battalion eventually took Vimy Ridge with assistance from the Canadians and after that he was transferred to the 85th battalion which was a Nova Scotia regiment. I don't think he was too pleased about that to leave all of his friends. I know I wouldn't be pleased. After his transfer the war was dragging on to an end and he was mainly out on patrols then. I always asked him if he had seen any Germans on some of his patrols and he responded, yes, this one night I saw half a dozen of them and they were

ten feet tall with Bertha sized guns. This was my father's way of letting me know that he wasn't going to talk any further. By the time the war ended in 1918 he came home shell shocked and this was a worry to his three sisters but it especially broke his mother's heart because they never knew where he was, for he would wander all around town. He eventually began to put the war behind him by the 1930s to eventually live a recollected and decent life. Father, I thank you for serving our family and our country of Scotland in that time of war. Before the start of World War I, Norman MacAulton came to Enfield, Nova Scotia to work for Jack Horn. He enlisted to serve in the war effort and named Enfield as his place of residence. Norman, no doubt, was the same as many who served in World War I.

He felt he would be gone for a few months, the job would be done and he would return to his normal life. Norman served with the 85th Battalion of the Canadian Infantry Nova Scotia Regiment and was killed in action on October 30th, 1917 near Ypres, Belgium. He has no known grave which was the byproduct of the type of trench warfare that soldiers experienced in World War I. At different battles so many lives were lost that it was hard to be able to keep clear records of burial sites. The weather often worked against proper burials and the mud that ensued was dreadful. In Ypres, Belgium, there is a memorial called the Menin Gate. Listed on this memorial are the names of soldiers like Norman MacTolden, who has no known grave. An arched monument over the main road greets travelers in and out of the city. This memorial holds the names of approximately 62,000 names of members of the infantry that have no known graves from World War I.

Each night since November 11th, 1918, the local fire department stops traffic at 8pm and has a service of remembrance. Only twice during World War II was this service missed due to them being in action during the fighting in this area. The people have a great gratitude for the sacrifice these men and women made for their liberation. Soon the French themselves would need liberating again, for the the deadliest war in all of history. It grew out of ancient and unordinary feelings. Anger, vigilance, the lust for power, and the thirst for revenge of the victors of World War I. But it ended because of courage, perseverance, selflessness, and the hunger for freedom, in which all of it was linked with the unimaginable chaos

and brutality in order to change the course of human events and history. World War II showed the best and the worst of humankind in a generation. In the slaughter that coveted the world, over 70 million people died. So many and in so many different places that the real number of casualties will never be determined. However, half of those that perished in the killings that engulfed the world were civilians. Innocent men, women and children were obliterated by the horrors of war. More than 85 million men and women served in uniform. But without the sacrifice of

those men and women in uniform, the war's outcome would have been completely different. The following stories are from those that were in service during World War II and how that cataclysmic event changed their lives. My name is Charles Valima. I was born and raised in Brandon, Wisconsin and my parents are Pete and Tina Valima. I have two younger sisters, Alice and Florence. I went to Westbrook School in the town of Springvale. Then I went to Willow Creek in the town of Wappen. I graduated from 8th grade and then worked on the farm I lived in.

Till I was about 18, worked with my dad. And then, I think I went to the shoe factory. Ideal shoe factory in Wappen. Worked for a board at home and worked in the shoe factory from 8am till 4pm. Whatever, 13 cents an hour. No, $13 a week was paid. I soon had to register for the draft. In 38, I guess it was, and then I was

drafted on July 29th. There were three, four boys from Wappen that went from Wappen to Milwaukee. Their names are Glenn Towne and Ben Lumens and Ken Coleman. I went by bus to Milwaukee and there we were examined and had to pass a physical. Kenny Coleman, who was probably the one that wanted to go into service the most, he didn't pass the physical. So we went back to Wappen and the rest of us went. I was drafted from 1941 to 1945. I was in the infantry so I went to infantry training.

I think maybe Ben Lumens became a policeman when he came home because I think he was in the military police during the service. As for Glen Town, he must have been a truck driver because he was a truck driver back in civilian life. I had basic training in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. I remember hearing about Poor Harbor when I was in the barracks. It was on Sunday about 4 o'clock in the afternoon North Carolina time. We had an old radio. The barracks were new but they were built like a barn. They had like a beam that ran from end to end about 6-8 inches wide and we had an old radio. The plastic cover was all off of it so we just had the tubes. Mostly everybody was gone on Sunday.

I remember being in there and then news came over that Pearl Harbor had been attacked so that kind of changed the picture because the next morning all these older men about 34 years older and up that were in service they had their bags all packed and they were going to go home Monday morning so when they were released for home, that was quite a commotion I guess eventually they didn't leave but I don't know, they were released after maybe a year or so After Pearl Harbor we stayed at Fort Bragg and kept training in Fort Bragg By that time we were put in divisions, regular army divisions and Fort Bragg was the 9th Infantry Division.

That's where I was in, the 47th Infantry Regiment, I guess they called it. The 9th division was the whole thing and included all the rifle and artillery and tank platoons. We had lots of training because first we thought we were going to be in half tracks. This was before Pearl Harbor. Then they switched us from that to landing craft. So we had the big rope ladders on the 50 foot board wall. We had to climb up and down that till you could do it pretty good. Up and down, up and down. Because that is the same thing that we had when we got off the ship. So we did lots of training. We went through Virginia, the beaches off Virginia, and what is

the Chesapeake Bay. Soon after I went to Camp Grant, Illinois. From there I went to Camp Wheeler in Macon, Georgia. This was in the end of July so you can imagine the temperature in Macon, Georgia at the time. I think we all lost a few pounds in a hurry. We sweat day and night. There we had a lot of close order drills and we finally got to use rifles and all of that. For weapons training we had the 03 first bolt action springfield like they used in World War I, but we would later receive the 45 and the M1 Grand. We were mostly a rifle platoon, for we had three rifle platoons in the company total, and then the last company had a large platoon, so they had a few machine guns,.50 caliber machine guns to be exact, and they also had some mortars. In a rifle platoon, we just had rifles and revolvers. That's when the Grand

came out, and which I think is the most amazing rifle ever designed by man. We had lots and lots of target practice. All day long we had a box of ammunition so you could just shoot all day long at targets. We really learned how to use a rifle. In November of 42 we landed in North Africa. It took us 21 days and what they did with the whole army was give them all the equipment that we needed, all the supplies that we needed. For I don't know how many days, all the ammunition, all the food was on. I think it was some 200 ships that was in this flotilla. And this was right in the thick of the German submarine warfare that was going on. And we could go all day long, for we'd be going until sun would set, get up the next morning, then all day long we'd

go with the sun behind us. They just did that. They said we zigzagged for 21 days so the enemy never was sure where we were going to end up. Every now and then they'd shut everything off because they had detected the submarine in amongst us. And it must have really been something to see all that many ships, all sizes. We had little ships that were smaller than a destroyer and what they call a smaller one. They'd go zigzagging through there and then everything would stop and they would drop depth charges. Then we would take off again. Now this was in North Africa. Most people don't know where there was a battle of North Africa.

Where we landed I think must be that Hitler wanted control of the Mediterranean Sea and our particular landing was in Safi, French Morocco. That's on the Atlantic side. There was two other companies and us landed in French Morocco and Safi. The rest of them went through the Algiers and Casablanca, landed all along the coastline. There was that French Foreign Legion because France was under German rule at the time so our enemy was the French Foreign Legion, partly for they were there then. Then there was the Italians and we were really fortunate. The Germans had just had maneuvers in that area and they left about a day or so before we got there. And when we landed, I don't know, I couldn't tell you how we were still in the boats going over, for German subs were still circling the seas. We got off from our

troop ships by throwing the ropes over the side and then we climbed down. Some of us had ground swell. I don't know if most of you ever saw groundswell. If you were in the navy then you saw it. They would be like 40 feet high and our ships would go up on there and the destroyer we loaded onto the destroyers. The little thing the destroyer would be down here. We were up there and then the two would get together. Then navy sailors would grab a hold of us and pull us up onto the destroyer. And then we would go back up and down, but we didn't lose a man. There was two destroyers, L Company on one, and then there was K Company on the other.

I was with L Company in the 9th Infantry Division. It was the day when we loaded up supplies onto the beach when early in the morning or at night it was dark, our battleships opened fire. I think we had red or green. Anyway, there was red shells going one way and the green shells were going the other way, and we were underneath the ground in foxholes because from shore they were firing out at the enemy battleships one way and they were firing towards the enemy inland fortifications the other way, so we had to go underneath. At Safi, we had a big breakwater and big long piers because at the piers, ships loaded and unloaded, and we went out because they must have had gates or submarine nets or whatever. After that, we got our concealed orders. Our mission was to protect the power plant,

and it was kind of dark when we got there. I don't know how many men I had with me but that was our mission so we couldn't let the enemy destroy the power. When we was scouting out the area around the neighboring towns there was a tent and there must have been eight or ten Arabs in that tent. Well they didn't know us and we didn't know them. All we had on for identification was a US flag sewn into our clothes so they knew what that was for. I didn't know whether to shoot them or what to do with them. We just sort of went in there and they mumbled and we mumbled. We just kept them from doing any harm. Then we got them all outside but

the other guys were all fighting we could hear their rifles but we didn't have to fire a shot. Then there were some fighting further away we could hear them firing their rifles. It was where the French Foreign Legion was but I later learned what happened. The officers of the French Foreign Legion knew that they were going to be landing and they had a big party the night before so so most of the soldiers were so drunk, they didn't know what was going on that morning. And then, after we landed, we had to have trenches and foxholes like I told you. The French had trenches already there too, but then the Arabs used that as their own for a resting area, or whatever you want to call it. So the next morning before that, the US commander

said if you hear an airplane, it is not ours because we don't have any, not at that particular time. So the next morning sure enough here we heard an airplane. We all dove in our foxholes and the commanders just laughed. Yeah what a mess. But then they dropped bombs and there was steel sheds in which men were hiding in, a ways from where we were and the plane went right over us. I could see the plane just as clear as possible. It was an Italian. It was real low. You could see the, just the bottom of it, just as nice.

And they dropped the bombs and my best buddy was killed. He was further back. He was our first sergeant from Fond du Loc, Wisconsin, which is approximately 18 miles northeast of Wappen. He kind of watched over me before we ever got there, but then he was killed that day. The shell fragment hit him and the bombs went off pretty close to us, but close enough that all the shell fragments flew away but that is what they said if you hear an airplane that is not us so that was our first experience in seeing any action and after that we stayed there maybe a month because when we started walking in December we only had one truck and the kitchen was loaded in the truck They had a general of our 47th infantry and he said,

instead of hauling all of you guys, you walk from now until March. You'll be hardened in and you'll be ready for action. So that's what we did. And we couldn't walk across Spanish Morocco because they were neutral, so he loaded us in the trucks to get us through there. They wouldn't allow us to walk across Spanish Morocco. And then while we were walking, we heard news about the bazooka and how it came out, and so they said they needed six sergeants. They picked up from the regiment, and I happened to be one of the lucky ones, so they loaded six of us with a ton of rocket ammunition and a rocket launcher

and a DC-3 plane. The 1st Army Division, the big red one that had been fighting against Rommel who was a German and a pretty famous general, fought all the way in Africa against the British and he was coming. So they loaded us up and that was the 1st Army Division that was fighting Rommel at the time and they nearly got wiped completely out because they had the old tanks that had the turret on the side that was fighting Rommel at the time and they nearly got wiped completely out because they had the old tanks that had the turret on the side that was stationary and the Germans just wiped them out completely. And then that's where we went up there with this bazooka that you had to get in about 150 feet of the tank to knock it out and all you could do was you had to be sure

to shoot them on this flat side of the tank between the racks on the top and bottom of the tracks and get it right in through there for the bazooka rocket would go through there. So we got up there and we had to demonstrate how to use the bazooka. They flew us and we stayed overnight. Landed one night on somewhere in the desert. We were right in the desert and the next day they landed a little closer but they never shut the engines off on the plane. We got out and as quick as we could get to the ground the plane was gone and then there we were with no other transportation except I don't know right at the time I didn't know how we did get from there to I suppose the 1st Army Division had transportation for us. We loaded our rocket ammunition up and when we were flying on the DC-3s we flew through the mountains and valleys between the mountains because they had fighter planes around them and it was so crook that a

fighter plane couldn't fly straight through there so we flew below the mountain peaks with the DC-3. One time there was such a change in the air pressure that the plane dropped. It dropped faster than the cargo in the plane, and there was quite a crash when the ton of ammunition boxes hit the bottom of the plane, and we thought the thing would go right down through. Then that night we landed. The Arabs were there to help you and sell you something. They told us we weren't that far

from a little town where the fighting was. Now their word for eggs was earths and we got to know that so we followed them and walked to town in the dark and then back to the plains in the morning and had some earths and wine. And the next morning we took off and went up to the front lines. Then after we got done up there instructing the use of bazookas we got back to our unit and the transportation officer said, you gotta get on this train. It's an old 40 and 8. It means 8 mules and 40 men can ride in this little boxcar. 40 and 8. You see that I think when you have the American Transportation Legion doing things. There's 40 and 8 signs posted and all around the site.

Faster travel to different camps. Directors and officers assist us, like the one I was chatting to who told me, You stay in this car, and eventually it will get you back to your unit. We didn't have much food. A few K-rations or whatever and a straw in the bottom of a canteen. I don't know what you used for a restroom because it was just a rail car unless they had one corner or something like that. We got out of that town and I don't know how many days it took us on the train. It was cold too. It was in December and no heat. This was in the winter of 42 from December until March. So first I flew up to

the front lines then back on the rail car and then I walked over the same territory again to get back to the front lines. But then things got interesting because Christmas was approaching and we had been up there and we was coming back by train. And we got in Algiers and I was all by myself because there was only six of us and when each of us was in this boxcar then of course we were all together but when I got to Algiers I wondered where I could go so I wandered around by myself and I found a Red Cross sign that directed me to a big tall two or three story Red Cross building or whatever. I visited there a lot and met a Red Cross woman and a few of my fellow wounded servicemen. However, on Christmas day, I went there and that was a big tall two or three story building and there was a Red Cross woman and she told me that I could spend

the night there, so that's what I did. Slept on the marble floor. That was Christmas, Christmas night. The next day I went back and found the train and then got it and went back. Afterwards we hooked up with the outfit. That was quite an experience before we could ever go fighting. Then in March we joined the British army and then we had British rations to live on. So that's when my division joined the fighting in North Africa. We were under Bradley, General Bradley, in Alexandria, Egypt. But there was, fighting was just as bad as there any other place. We lost lots of men. That's when I got the bronze star. We lost one whole battalion to the Germans. Must have been just like a mountain pass. And then to let them walk into there and that's the last they ever saw of that bunch of

men. It was Kasserine. It was right in that area. That scuffle took up until Mother's Day of 43. Yeah, we got out of Tunisia and loaded onto the boats and went to Sicily. Anyways, at Tunisia Berzerda there was a lot of soldiers that didn't want to give up. I suppose they were German soldiers and they just walked out into the ocean there off the beach and airplanes were just that there was a lot of soldiers that didn't want to give up. I suppose they were German soldiers. They just walked out into the ocean there off the beach and airplanes were just strafing them back and forth. There was thousands of soldiers in Tunisia-Berzerdi. So that was what they did after we had captured Tunisia. They walked right in and it was awful. The slaughter. The Germans didn't want to give up but the Italians they gave up by the thousands. Then we went from there to Palermo, Sicily and that night at Palermo we got bombed all night long. I don't know how they missed our boat. There were ships

burning. Then they had little, I can't think of the name, little ships that laid smoke screens. They tried to keep the fire from showing from up above. We survived that one. Then we landed at the coast so we got off the devil and pushed up there. That was the strategy for fighting in Sicily. Then we had Berlin Betty. She was the propaganda gal from Germany. She knew every move that we made. She'd come over the radio. She'd tell us where we were and where we were going. She'd say, don't think you're going to win. You're getting paid in pounds just to land troops in England. You see, she knew we were going to England. After we took Sicily, we were waiting right on the airport in case they were needed in Italy.

We were right there and eventually was ready in an instant. We could get on a plane and fly into Italy. When everything ended there we were all sent into England. Then we knew what the next thing was. If you all were wondering I wasn't involved in D-Day. I had mumps about a month or so before that so I was in the hospital. That saved me. Our unit was in D-Day though and most of them had trouble coping with what had happened that day for they lost a lot that day because we had experiences in landing before. For had been in Sicily and other places we were in the backup or the reserve forces so we were not in the initial landing. Then they released me out of the hospital and the commanders put our reserve forces in tents out in the country.

Eventually, we re-entered the fighting. There was lots of reception centers, or whatever you call it, and we could go there, and then they would fly us over to France, to Saint-Lô, which was a town our unit had just taken, and now they had gone up to Cherbourg, France and then they were on their way back to Saint-Lô so the plane landed near Saint-Lô and I got off there and I got back to my unit but that day they were flying the planes, our planes, and they were bombing the Germans. They didn't have the means we do today but they put markers out so the airplanes would fly in and drop smoke bombs where the markers were placed, which was where the bombers should drop the bombs.

Well, that day we had a good strong wind coming inland, and where they landed me the smoke was going over us and went all the way back to our supply regiment. And they were, our planes, bombing our own men and even getting our headquarters. So I had trouble getting over that horrifying situation. After I hooked up with my unit in St. Lowe, I got to be in charge of my platoon. It only had a few soldiers left, so I requested for some new ones. My request was granted, so the new boys went all the way to St. Lowe from Normandy, and I led my unit up to Cherbourg and back down to St. Lowe, and that's where led my unit up to Cherbourg and back down to St. Lowe

and that's where I met up with our regular 9th Infantry Division and the 47th, my own company and my own soldiers that were under me. A few of them had been killed up in Cherbourg but there were some more on their way. That's where I got under General George S. Patton. There we loaded on tanks. We rode on the outside of tanks and he just said, With your blood and my guts, we can do anything. So we did. We went through France. They said we had more German soldiers behind us than we had in front of us.

We just cut a swath right through there. He was a good leader. He was some fighter. They said at one time, probably all of you heard it too, that he stopped the ambulances and said his tanks had to go through. Whether that was true or not, I don't know. I imagine it was because the ambulances were in his way so he told him to get out of the way and let his tanks through. So then in July is when we got to the Meuse River. Afterwards we went through France and Belgium and that was an awful thing to see because we'd go through these town they had an American flag and a German flag so when the Germans were in town or went through town they're all waving the German

flags and if the Americans came through they were all waving the American flags. We had lots of skirmishes there with bombings or shelling. Then we got from France to Belgium and to the Meuse River separating Belgium from Germany and we crossed the Meuse River and that's when I got hit. Big shells from the Siegfried line could reach us then so that's when the thought of my life ending really hit me and I thought that that was the end of it for me. but I was tended to as we crossed the river in that boat and then we landed to some higher ground and there were some trees. Whether the shells hit the trees or they were trapped with time bombs set off to go off or what,

we had just did something that we were told which was to never bunch up so there was four or five of us. We got a trench or a foxhole dug so we could sit and put our feet down. I think there were four or five of us. Anyway, they were all killed except me. The Germans pounded our positions with shells and my best buddy died there. So after that, my whole left side was all full of shrapnel, and there's still some tiny pieces of shrapnel in there to this day. I consider it a little lucky that the shrapnel, and there's still some tiny pieces of shrapnel in there to this day. I consider it a little lucky that the shrapnel didn't hit any vital organs, as the medics told me. I spotted some more that were injured, but they could walk. Then the officer said to me,

can you remember where we crossed the river? I responded yes, and he ordered me to take these two wounded men with me and to see if I can find where I crossed and if I managed to do so then I'd find a first aid station and the medics there would get us back to the field hospital. I was pretty good that way about remembering. I could always remember directions and where to go. I don't remember how we got back to the river and just how we got back across. There must have been a boat there because I remember waking up on a boat and the two guys I got back with. I had one guy on each arm during the hike back to the river. We're older fellas. And when I got back to the first aid station, or maybe they called it the army hospital, they put me on a stretcher because I had an ankle that was injured

and shrapnel in my body. In the field hospital they started operating on taking all the shrapnel out of my body. Then I was on a stretcher and I heard that I had helped the other guys all the way back to the river where I passed out due to loss of blood and they put me on a stretcher and moved me into the boat and the two took me to the hospital where I stayed there for two or three weeks, I guess. Another interesting thing was when we left the field hospital, we had to go to England. When we got to Fabroche Hospital outside of Paris, France, there were hundreds of ambulances on this airport waiting.

They were all in different lines, and we saw the ambulances on one side of us, we were moving, and then we saw them moving on the other side. We didn't have a driver in ours, so we were just sitting there, and after a while somebody opens up the back of the ambulance and says, Sprechen Sie Deutsch? Here were we inside this freaking ambulance in which the dumb driver had left us in the row for the Germans. Now we didn't have any clothing on besides an army blanket around our waist, and we didn't have any clothing on besides an army blanket around our waist, and we didn't have any identification of any kind, but somehow we got back to England. I recuperated in England in July. Afterwards, we trained the troops, which were mainly recruits from the states, in England. Now in December of 1944, the winter after D-Day, we were still

training troops, but this was right at that time the Battle of the Bulge was going on. After we trained the troops in our unit, they were sent to France to help stop the German counterattack. They fought all the way through to the end of the war. Well, all the way through Germany. It seemed that if the officers needed something done, the first chance they have to get it. That's what our unit we were training was meant to do, be the first responders to the officer's call. Eventually I entered the first division from Texas. They were the number one division and we were in reserve for them. So they were better than my original ninth division because they were number one. The red

arrow or the big red one. Our symbol or emblem or whatever had an emerald green circle with a red one insignia on the circle and the red one was outlined with white. That's what made us the big red one. I forgot to mention that's where all our officers came from to train us when we was in Wisconsin in the states. Yes, the officers that trained us were from the Big Red One in Texas. Anyways, after I entered the reserves of the Big Red One, that's when things must have been winding down or something. The last group, that was something else. Afraid they brought 200 GIs that had been locked up in prisons for just minor things, but they're all prisoners, you know. They brought us those 201 group and put them and they stayed

in their barracks for they didn't stay with us in our barracks they were in their own and they had some good old times out there but they minded pretty good and we trained them and they were good soldiers and when they were all done the first lieutenant says now you can all take a furlough and gave them passes to London, and we thought, well, this will be the last time we'll ever see of them. I think all but one or two of them actually did go and came back, so from there, then we came back to one reception center after another, and then came home, flew home. We were the last plane to come home because they divided us up into plane loads.

First Birmingham, England, then we went to Scotland, and Scotland was where the planes left for the States. And they had Quonset huts in Scotland, and each Quonset had just a plane load of soldiers or any troops that were ready to go home. We flew back. The nurses and officers, if they had rank over us, could bump us, and then they could go, and of course everyone gradually got bumped and then got put into a different plane. So eventually there were only 13 of us left, and we'd been there for a few weeks. However, a few days later we

leave on a big four-engine plane. We would just jump from Scotland to Iceland or Greenland because we stopped at each one of them when we needed fuel. But there was only 13 on the great big four engine thing. And they said that was the last plane that was flying out of there and no more would come back. However, the war was still going on in Japan when I returned home. But after we dropped the two atomic bombs, I knew like the rest of our country that the war was over. And it was cause I remember going to the theater and watching. Movie tone news film strip about the atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan,

and then they showed Japan surrendering to us on one of our naval vessels. Afterwards, in my point of view, our whole country went wild with celebration. All the streamers, the boos, and the cheering of families. As for me, I was just glad that awful hell of war was over. But yeah, I'm still classified as disabled, 20% or whatever. I had a few pieces of shrapnel right in the bone of my ankle, but I'm still breathing. I want to thank each and every one of you for listening to my experience, and I hope you all, who took your time off to listen to this, especially all the other veterans like myself, have a very nice day.

My name is William Jennings Arnett and I live in West Virginia. I'm 84 years old having been born on July 19th, 1917. I was in the Tank Destroyer Unit, I guess you could call it an armored unit, and we were attached to the 5th Infantry Division and later on to the 26th Infantry Division during World War II. I would eventually be discharged as a first private class, but I had other ranks during my several years of service. However, that is the way I was discharged when it came to my service. Most of the training I underwent was in the United States, and then we went to Ireland, from Ireland to England, and from England to France.

I was in Normandy, North France, the Bulge, and Germany, and then on to Czechoslovakia, which was where we were when the war ended. When I went into the army, it was a draft for one year, and I enlisted to get my one year over with. That never happened, for I got it over in five years. I was living in Clarksburg, West Virginia at the time of my service, and I wanted to get that year out of the way so it wouldn't be hanging over my head that I had to leave my job. If you're asking as to why I picked the army, I had no particular reason, I just did. I had and still don't have anything against the Navy or Marine Corps, but the army is just where I went. Anyways, my first three days we were sent to well we ended up going to

Fort Russell Texas. It is roughly in the El Paso area and the first haircut I got was well the barber laid a comb thin comb flat on my head and then cut everything that was sticking up. He did that with almost everyone that was drafted or joined the service. I knew some people that attended the service with me, but they never ended up in the same company I was in and we were soon separated. At the training camp we were at, it was hot, even in January it was hot, for that hell was desert country. And the buildings or barracks were all built of adobe, so they were very cool and nice that way, but the parade ground where all the recruit work was being done was hot and sandy and dusky. I had my fair share of the mess ups which put me on KP duty. Now you might be thinking wasn't KP duty illegal and the answer

is yes by hell it was but they did use KP as a punishment duty. It was only issued to you usually if you messed up some way or the other. The only thing I guess I really learned at camp was to load a mobile gun at the orders of a tank commander. That's what they put on my recommendations to take to civilian life anyway, of what I learned. But I learned generally everything. Take all the rifles and machine guns and everything, take them clear apart and put them together again, time and time again. The instructor was very good at their duty. I had one sergeant at our group, he was a bit of a chowhound himself, and when we were on parade and it came time for the noon meal, he would march us down in the field and then leave us at detention, and he would walk over to the door of the mess hall, and he would holler over to us, fall out. That left him first in line.

After camp we were trained in 155mm Howitzers, and we went with them to fire at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. When we got there, they had a ton of guns. We mainly had a lot of 37mm cannons, and they even handed a handful of rocks to some of us which caused a ton of laughter. We mainly had a lot of 37mm cannons, and they even handed a handful of rocks to some of us which caused a ton of laughter in our unit. Eventually when we came back, they decided to turn all the anti-tank companies around and make them into a tank destroyer unit, at which time we were issued half-tracks with 75mm guns on them, which we learned to use. After we learned about our new half tracks we went to Camp Bowie, Texas in Brownwood, a town of about 5,000 and 15,000 soldiers there. So you figure about how much fun the town was. And we went there to Camp Pickett, Virginia where we were trained

for landings for when we were going to go to Africa. For some reason or other they called us back and we were sent. I never did understand what went on there and from Pickett we went to New York later on and Fort Dixon, Camp Shanks and we left there from the Brooklyn Navy Yard and from there we went to Ireland. When we embarked from Ireland we were a part of an enormous convoy. There were small aircraft carriers, real small ones, but they were loaded with airplanes all over the deck so they couldn't fly off them. There was a battleship with them and I think two cruisers or three. Also there was a bunch of destroyers. Then all the other ships were oilers, freights, and troop ships. Our ship had

about 25,000 soldiers on it and unfortunately the motor went out and of course the convoy went on. They can't wait for you and then we were there overnight worried sick for we were in the submarine area. However the next morning they got the motor fixed and we caught up with the convoy but the motors broke down again and we had another night at the same thing. I began to think that maybe this wasn't all fun. Just before we reached Ireland I began looking off the balcony of our vessel at night and at times I could see torpedoes coming along the side of our ship. Now we knew Northern Ireland was under the control of the British and we landed at Belfast.

Most of us were relieved that we were finally in Ireland. We got there in October, and after a real rough North Atlantic crossing, for the North Atlantic in the fall is not the best place to be, and we were there to about April, and from April of 44 we went to England, and we were in England until we went to France for the big invasion of France that we all call D-Day. We landed at Utah Beach but it was after most of the division was inland but I'd say maybe 10 miles. But from the time we got there it was about a month before they were to break out the bridgeheads and that was when the Normandy campaign ended after the breakout. Anyways when we landed at Utah Beach, we came in pretty close because there wasn't any

fighting right on the beach then. It was inland about, oh, maybe five or six miles. Then when we got there, we stayed where we first got off and we could see there the night-like heat lightning. But what it was, was the artillery. It was continuous and it was all night long. It didn't worry me any because I knew I would never get hurt. The next day we moved up and into a field. One of those Normandy fields and there were some crows there. We met the man who owned the farm and he came in and got his two cows out. I said we were not going to steal his milk or anything so we left them alone. He knew what he was doing but I didn't know why he was moving them.

I found out a little later when they started showing us. Now the next day was a nice warm sunny day. It was fairly quiet in our area and I was sitting under a tree. Didn't have any duty right then and I heard this shell coming in and I knew although I had never heard one before what it was and I rolled over to my side and it, and I jumped up to run for a foxhole. Now, I didn't know that Germans shot more than one shell at a time, and there was another one right behind it that was covered up from the sound of the first one going off. And when that one exploded, it jarred me real, real bad,. I was completely numb all over. I couldn't feel anything. I jumped into the foxhole and I looked down and the back of my hand was all covered in blood. Since I couldn't feel anything, I had to feel my hand to see where I had been hit, but I couldn't feel any place where

it was torn or anything. And I tried to realize that maybe I brushed my hand against my leg, and I felt that leg and I was alright and then I saw the blood was running off my nose and that really scared me because I didn't know how much my face was gone but I got out of it pretty good. I must say I've never felt more lucky in my life. Now we were usually with the infantry wherever we were assigned a mission. We weren't at the very front of the infantry but we were real close to them and at night there was a tank battalion as well as a tank destroyer that was assigned to each regiment. The tanks would pull out and go maybe about three or four miles at night but whenever

they would start their motors up the Germans would start shelling us and we had to stay there all night. I thought maybe I would get in a tank corps and get out of this stuff but during that time my requests were turned down so I was still in the tank destroyer unit. Now in combat theory the tank destroyers were supposed to be largely a defense element against German tanks but they ended up being exactly what General Patton said, the only way to fight a tank is with a tank. So we ended up with a regular tank with 90mm gun on which it is an excellent tank and much better than the regular tanks the main armored units were using. After we received our tanks we received a symbol for them. It is a tiger

or panther biting or eating a tank up. It was a mock go, seek, strike and destroy kind of thing. Now when we went inside those beasts there were lots of very flammable lines of oil and gasoline It was a mock go, seek, strike and destroy kind of thing. Now when we went inside those beasts there were lots of very flammable lines of oil and gasoline as well as ammunition that was ready to either be fired or blown up. We had both inflammable and armor piercing rounds. It was not a very comfortable place to be. Very warm. It was not very cold in the winter. One of my biggest fears was that the turret hatch was almost always open and that sometimes caused a little trouble because it was just big enough for a bomb to fall into it. Now you might be thinking the bombings of World War II were mostly inaccurate at this time but we didn't know what the German bombers were like.

Anyways, when we crossed the Rhine river, we were out in the middle of the river on one of those pontoon bridges, which was just wide enough for the tracks on our tank, and a German 262 jet bomber came and tried to bomb the bridge out, and I thought, this is a nice place to be in the middle of the Rhine river. But fortunately, they didn't get us. Once we crossed the Rhine river the casualties really began to mount. There were several actually, I can't tell you how many. The first soldier was killed by a shell while he was on sentry duty and he was trying to relieve us for shut-eye, but then the shells came down. Everybody was then scared to death and they didn't know what they

were doing. If you were moving around at night it is very very dangerous because you never know what you're going to run into and it almost happened to me later on. More casualties occurred when we simply went to line up to get our meals. We had our kitchen trucks with us and that caused us to get pinned in there because we got all in a line to get our mess kits filled and the shells started coming in and of course that was the end of the meal. And the next day we did it again and the shells started coming in. And of course, that was the end of the meal. And the next day we did it again and the same thing happened again. We then decided we would fool the Germans by switching our meal time from 12 o'clock to 11. So we got in line and the shells came again. Now we didn't realize it, but the Germans were watching us. They could see what we were up to. When we got a bunch of guys together, they made the shelling worthwhile.

They would let us have it. I don't remember too much about meals, but those first couple of nights were one of the few warm meals. They were much better than K-rations or C-rations. That's the only thing I remember now about the cooking, because we weren't around the kitchen trucks very often. But when they came later on, we went down to the truck to eat and the cooks, and one time this mess sergeant had found a small keg of calvados, and when we went down, it looked like they had all been shot. They're all down in the back of the truck, and the calvados is what they kicked in alcohol to get the drinker easily drunk, so it was dangerous. We had late in the spring of 44 or anyhow the 5th division of

the 15,000 officers and men. There was about a dozen that would be allowed a week's furlough in Paris and anybody would give his right arm for it and my platoon lieutenant got one of them but but he found out later that day that we were going on attack the next morning and he wouldn't go because he wanted to stay with us, his men, and I've admired the man ever since. The lieutenant was a man named Muggy, a young Iowa boy from German parentage. He survived the war but did have a little nervous spell once. He would have the habit of, if we were going into a small town or something, getting on a hill and look it over to see what it was before we got in it. One time he was out looking at one of these towns and someone tapped him on the shoulder. It was a German, but instead of killing him, he handed him his rifle and surrendered

to him. So Muggy took his gun and went back and put a call in for the MPs to come and get him. He sometimes thought, what if the guy hadn't wanted to surrender? What if he had just stabbed me with a bayonet or a knife? That got him kind of nervous, but overall he was really nice. Anyways, most have asked me if I saw many French citizens, and to be honest, I hardly ever saw them. If they could, they would leave the area of battle, but we occasionally ran into some a few times. However, the only time I was in real contact with any of them was when I ran into a Frenchman that had escaped from a prisoner of war camp in Rheims, France. He asked me and the crew of our tank where he was in France.

He was scared because he needed help to get back home, so we told him where he was and with the information he managed to go back to his home that day. He invited our tank crew over for he and his family consisting of his friend, his wife and his brothers who were French soldiers were having a big party. Now we were sitting there and they were giving us wine and everything and we were having a ball. We would offer him a cigarette in which they were very valuable but he wouldn't take it but boy his wife who wasn't drinking that much did take it. When we went to leave two guys from our team got behind me and I looked at them and said boy you kissed me on the mouth and you were on the floor. Of course they touched cheeks it was all right but the rest of

the gang wanted to see what would happen to me before they tried it. Another time I saw a group the only time I saw a group of Frenchmen they had too much to drink. They had one of those wheelbarrows with a long wooden box on it and they were giving me a sign by drawing their hands around their throats and saying la boche la boche. They were going out to bury whatever or whoever was in the box. Now the only family I had was a sister that I kept in touch with and a mother. Fortunately I wasn't married at that time. My mother would get a letter from me and then they would get one. The next one would be the one that I had written before the first one or she might go

two or three weeks and get none at all and I wrote her every week but then she might go two or three weeks and get none at all, and I wrote her every week. But then she might get three or four of them at one time, but she was not very worried about it. As for me, I did feel stressed, but not all the time. An example of why I was stressed is because after a while, one realizes that his chances of survival in this war were getting dimmer all the time, and you do know that you can only be missed so many times. That was probably the main reason why I was stressed. Now when it comes to other letters like newsletters, I didn't see any newspaper people ever. However, we would get a paper occasionally at Stars and Stripes which had three day old news because they figured after three days

you could publish it because the Germans would have known anything by then. Anyways, after we saw the two groups of Frenchmen, we went through Luxembourg, and one of our crew members, a boy from Tennessee to be exact, observed people leaning along the edge of a shop of some kind, but what caught his eyes was a sign on the window that read B.I.E.R., so we knew we were pretty close to Germany. He asked, Parlez-vous François, oui? Have you got any cognac? So we were close to Germany, and you can picture the excitement we felt as we moved towards the border, but what none of us knew was that this was all in the German plan for a bulge counterattack in which we now know today as the Battle of the Bulge. Now we entered Germany a few days before the opening assault and were at Santa Ladder,

attached to the 5th Infantry Division when the battle broke out. As I read through the Stars and Stripes paper, I found out that soldiers up north of us were really getting pounded. That's when I first realized that the bulge was a serious attack, and I was feeling really sorry for them. At one point, somebody found a deck of cards. We got three other guys to play bridge, so we played in the basement of a wrecked house. There wasn't a whole house in the whole town that was all in one piece.

We were down in the basement, and the ventilation was very good with lots of light and we were having a good time playing bridge until a shell hit just south of us and then about half a minute later a shell hit up just north of us. It made the observers get the artillery ready and then the target right on and it's amazing how they were able to retaliate so quickly for they were bracketed by the shelling. Anyways, we kept on playing because there was just no place to go, and I don't think anybody knew what their cards were, but fortunately, no more shells landed close to the basement we were playing in.

We were real lucky, for the rest of the shells that landed were about 100 yards back. The next day, we were attached to the 26th Division and headed for the same place there in Luxembourg, and by the time we got to Luxembourg is when all of the snow started. We were also linked up with the 4th armored division when we got to Luxembourg, so we were now with two divisions which made our numbers grow extremely high. We did have to sleep in the snow because we usually like to sleep inside the tank, but when steel gets real cold, it is colder on the outside and it's warmer laying in the snow than it was inside that tank, but we slept under the tank in the snow. On Christmas Day, the officers sent an even amount of turkey up. At the time, we were staying inside a house in Luxembourg at the time, and the lady there cooked our turkey for her kitchen, and her family was glad to get rid of it.

There were three of us staying in the house, because the family had invited us to sleep there on their floor because it was so cold outside, and we sure did appreciate it. After that, the lady cooked the turkey inside the stone-type ovens where you fill them up with wood and feed them that way, and we really had a good Christmas dinner in the middle of a real bad situation. It was very unusual but a nice experience. Well Christmas was short-lived so we kept going forward and well you really don't know how a battle is going. All you know is what is going on around you and what little area you are in. You don't know whether you are winning or losing but

I guess if you are retreating or going backwards then you are losing. However that is only a little part of it but you keep doing what you have to do. Now I had no leave so I was in the bulge the entire way through and all I can say is that it was just a matter of going back and attacking in a different place so we went to a place called Bastogne and kept going. We eventually broke through the Bastogne and then we entered Germany and from then on it was mostly a matter of time before we reached Berlin. Now I don't know the casualties of the Battle of the Bulge.

It is not something you've counted anyhow because the only thing you did count was your friends that were left. Now, we were part of the drive to Berlin. Instead, we were set to attack Pilsen, Czechoslovakia, and they called the attack off. That was when they realized something big was coming up when they did that, and the next day they announced that Hitler was dead, and the German generals were preparing to surrender to the Allied forces. Now that date is one I'll never forget. It was May the 8th, 1945, the end of the European war. There wasn't any of the unusual celebration you see in film strips of the states at all. In Europe it was just kind of a sigh of relief more than anything else and unbelief too that the war was actually over.

About the only reaction I had is when we went into the house before we were relieved somebody said, well we don't have to keep the curtains drawn now for a blackout and he opened them up. And I couldn't stand for that, people outside being able to see in. Still that had been two years since I had ever seen outside lights. Murphy was the most decorated man. He slept with a.45 under his pillow until he got killed. It gets to you, just like it gets to me. We came back on a ship that was made to handle, I think, 4,500 men, and they were putting 6,500 on them. The ones that were being loaded with that crap ton had to sleep on the deck. Now, they didn't have any of the duties to clean up around the ship.

I was really lucky because I got a bunk. More specifically, I was on the top bunk. Anyways, we left Marseille and went to Norfolk, so we were in warm and beautiful fall weather. We eventually rode in a truck to a fort outside of Baltimore at Fort George Meade. I was discharged from there. They had sent me home on a furlough and I was home for about a month before I was officially discharged because they couldn't discharge everybody at the same time because they would call you back and say the numbers were too great. But eventually they would call you back when they could handle you. A few months after the war I got myself a job and began going to work. I was working outside the factory where I used to work. Now there was this noise that sounded very much like a shell

coming in. Although the war had been over for a few months I still hit the dirt, just an automatic thing and I had reoccurring bad dreams in which my wife kicked me to wake me because I was moaning and groaning and everything. Now that went on very heavy for about oh 15-20 years and once a year I'd usually have one of those dreams. Anyways that's my experience in World War II and I want to thank you all for taking your time to listen to this for you have shown me how much a serviceman means to our country of the United States of America. My name is Kenneth Delaney. I was born and raised in Historia, Long Island City, New York. Got married May 16th, 1953 and have 5 children, 2 girls, 3 boys and 15 grandchildren, 8 girls and 7 boys and they all know grandpa's war stories, especially about D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge.

The Battle of the Bulge started December 16th, 1944. I was still in the hospital from the wounds that I received in the Hurtgen Forest battle back in November. That was my second wound. Anyway, the German army, about 25 divisions, opened up an artillery barrage on the American front in Belgium. It was held by two crack divisions, American divisions, and one armor division in reserve. The two American divisions had been badly beaten from the Hurtgen Forest, and one armored division in reserve. The two American divisions had been badly beaten from the Hurtgen Forest and the Hurtgen Forest battle around the end of November. I was recuperating from the wounds received in that battle at a hospital, like I said,

in Liege. Then on December 17th, the hospital staff informed us that if you can walk or crawl, you know, you have to go back to your division headquarters as soon as possible. I fought with the 1st Infantry Division, 18th Regimental Combat Team on D-Day, Omaha Beach, in the Hurchin Forest Battle. I got back to my outfit on December 18th and I left the hospital. On December 19th, the next day, I again joined my regiment. I traded my walking cane in for an M1 rifle and some hand grenades. The company commander told me I had to take over the 3rd squad when, you know, when I got to the outfit up in the front. When I reached the foxholes where the companies were, I found the 1st platoon. They were in position on the front lines, so the platoon sergeant showed me where the third squad was.

Now usually the squad has 12 men. My squad, the third squad, had about 8 riflemen and they were all new replacements and no combat experience. Finally, got orders to move toward enemy position. We advanced about 8 or 10 miles through the woods and a couple of small villages which had to search every house for German soldiers but both villages were empty. Then about an hour later we were back in a wooded area again and that's when all hell broke loose. The first platoon ran into a machine gun nest. Besides carrying a rifle and hand grenades, I also carried a radio set called a walkie-talkie

and my lieutenant told me to radio for tank support because the platoon was pinned down. We were pinned down for at least an hour, still without tank support. I wasn't too worried because we had pretty good backup with the second 3rd platoons on our left and right flanks. I had been carrying 6 hand grenades, hand grenades which came in pretty handy. Before we silenced the machine gun fire, 4 men in our squad were wounded and 3 were killed. Later that day they gave me 4 replacements. On December 20th, 21st, the company moved out and advanced about 12 miles further into Belgium. My squad, the third squad, and the first squad ran into two German squads. They saw us running towards them and decided to surrender, all 19 of them. Then on December 22nd, we started out with another mission.

I noticed a farmhouse in the distance and as we got closer I noticed some activity around the house. Then I signaled the platoon to lay low and take cover. I signaled with my left hand above my head when I felt a sting in my left arm, a very hot sting. We took the farmhouse about half an hour later, taking three more prisoners. I felt my hand, my left hand wet and sweaty when I pulled my jacket sleeve up, took my glove prisoners. I felt my hand, my left hand wet and sweaty when I pulled my jacket sleeve up, took my glove off. I saw blood on my arm starting, you know, on my arm, all over my watch, and then my arm started to hurt. The field medic took me back to the field hospital, which was about anywhere to seven to ten miles. We went by, you know, by army jeep, and

then back to the hospital doctor, said it was a small bullet went straight through my arm. So I stayed there three weeks in the field hospital and then went back to my company to combat duty again and was wounded again but slightly. One thing we were told was to never take a path that is already made in the woods or the forest for fear of landmines being planted there. But on January 28th we started to move out for the next village at about 8am. The village was about 3 or 4 miles down the road so we decided to cross an open field and guess what, it was mined. Our platoon leader, lieutenant, I forgot his name, decided to call for a Sherman tank but the radio I had, walkie-talkie, was not working to tell them

what the situation is and he called. Hey Delaney, you gotta go back to the company headquarters and tell them what happened to get a tank up here. To make a long story longer, we got the tanks to spray the minefield to blow up what mines were in there and there were some. Then about an hour later we moved out toward the woods again. So being the first scout naturally I was the first man in the woods. It was a pretty thick wooded area, almost a forest but not quite. So I decided to take the path that I saw. Didn't take long to find one. The path was an incline that led up the main road that we found out later were going to take anyways which were held by German troops that were up the main road that we found out later were going to take anyways,

which were held by German troops that were holding the road so we were told. The road had to be taken so our convoy could get through with some supplies to our troops in different areas. I was nearing the top of the incline near the road when I noticed a pile of logs on the crest of the hill. So I turned to my second scout and said, You know, it looks a lot like a machine gun nest. So he looked at me and said, you know, if it is, then we should be dead. I hand signaled back to the first and second squad to lay low until we found out it was, and thank god it wasn't, when three machine gunners jumped out from behind the log with their hands up and said please don't shoot we surrender and I guess we lucked out again. On May 8th 1945 the war ended. We all got drunk but I was in combat from the end of January to February, March, April

until the end of the war and we had a big party that day. But one more story on patrol we had in Czechoslovakia on May 11th, 1945. We went into, I believe it was before we got into Pilsen with the trucks with loudspeakers to tell Germans the war had ended, you know, that it's over and we had one soldier with us that went through seven campaigns without a scratch. I don't know how he'd done it, but we ran into a machine gun nest. They fired on us and he caught a bullet and it was his first and last wound. He died that day and here is a guy that went through the whole thing and when the war ended, it was how he ended. We got the four German soldiers with a.50 caliber mounted machine

gun on top of our truck and that was our last combat with the enemy. Anyway, the war was over for most of us, but it was also over for him. Just want to say one more thing. Thank you for My name is Donald Patrick Finn and I'm 87 years old. I served in World War II in the United States Navy. I enlisted in August 1939 and I entered the Navy because I thought that branch might be a good career choice and I really wanted to see a lot of the world. Boot camp was alright. Early mornings, lots of drills, and I was usually late to bed. I think it was about six weeks of drilling and learning to shoot a rifle.

Then I really didn't know where we would go from there. After boot camp in San Diego, I was assigned. I think it must have been in early November of 1939, with several of my boot camp buddies to be aboard the aircraft carrier, Enterprise, which was based in Pearl Harbor. I was serving between the area of Midway Island and Pearl Harbor. However, we were mainly in Pearl Harbor and I had a tour of duty just previous to December the 7th at Midway Island, which is a few hundred miles, quite a few hundred miles west of Pearl Harbor. Just before we entered the war from the Pearl Harbor attack, I achieved

the rank of Aviation Machinist, 3rd Class. Most people asked if I saw combat in my early days of service, but I didn't hear or see a single shot fired until December 7th, 1941. There wasn't any combat until then but on that infamous morning on December 7th, a lot of guys had already gone to breakfast and a lot of the guys had not. Now I was one of the guys that missed his breakfast so while I was looking out the window toward where our hangars were, fully intending to go to breakfast, we watched a plane that was diving in the vicinity of the hangars where our fully intending to go to breakfast, we watched a plane that was diving in the vicinity of the hangars where our planes were caged. Suddenly we heard a loud explosion, and when

the plane pulled out of its dive, we saw the insignia of the Japanese Air Force, and that's when all the fear started among those of us who were still in the barracks waiting to go to breakfast. We never went to breakfast, but we did go to the mess hall but there was no breakfast being served because there were a lot of injured men being set on tables so medics could perform treatments. Also people were coming in from ships that had already been hit so we never had breakfast. A lot of people came to help and it kind of became a mess in there. I was on port island so it some time, maybe as much as a

half an hour, while the mess hall was full of people coming in from ships, first aid and so on. And officers letting us know that pretty soon we better get down to wherever our battle stations were. And of course, our battle stations were way down at the other end of the island where the sea planes were housed, so we began to leg it pretty fast. I don't think we even looked at the Arizona when we started to run for it, we just knew later that the Arizona had been hit and sunk. But anyways, we could see some of the planes that had already dropped torpedoes and the planes that were making torpedo runs. We could see them when we were running down the hangar where our planes were. And when we got there, we saw that a bomb had gone through the roof of the hangar where the planes were and blown off the hangar door,

which is about 30 feet high and twice as wide. A huge hangar. The concrete structure where the planes were supposed to be anchored had collapsed, but several planes had been outside the hangar and they were hit by flying concrete and bursting bombs. Then, we were put to work trying to clear some of the debris while the battle was still going on. There were still planes coming down the channel making torpedo runs on the ships that were in the harbor. When the first wave ended, I don't remember how long it lasted, maybe an hour, there was a long pause and then there suddenly was a second wave. So we were on the channel,

kind of narrow that comes in from the sea to Pearl Harbor and one ship was trying to make its way out. It got away from its anchorage and wanted to get put to sea but it never made it. It got stuck in the channel just opposite from where our hangars were. I think the ship was the West Virginia but I'm not sure now. Along sometimes in the afternoon, the attack had finally ceased and lunch came around. I don't remember what it was. Sandwiches, I guess. And we were at the hangar for the rest of the night. We didn't go back into the barracks. Surprisingly, nobody in our unit at least was wounded or dead.

There were no casualties. None. We were, for the time, not on a ship at all because all the ships were back from where our planes were, as much as a quarter mile or more. And at night, when it was dark, there were some planes, of our own planes as I recall, coming in for landings and they would have been one of the carriers that had been out to sea. There were no carriers parked in Pearl Harbor at the time of the bombing, and when some of those planes came in, some of the people, our people with machine guns, got itchy fingers and shot at them, but they didn't hit them. So that is actually what ended Pearl Harbor attack that day, I guess. I got a citation as a member of the force that went

out from Pearl Harbor a few days after Pearl Harbor. We went out to the Pacific areas in Australia and the Dutch Indies. One was the operation of the island of Ambon and another was at Saipan. It was a unit citation and the reason for the unit citation was constantly daily patrols, long hours, and a terrific attrition of aircraft. With the 12 or so planes that went out, there weren't any that came back. It was tough going on most patrols. There was as much accidents as planes that were shot down. But now that I think about it, in fact, only a couple of planes were shot up, and a couple that were bombed in hangars.

The beginning of the war for us was awful, for we were constantly on the run, due to our focus being in Europe. Anyways that was what the unit citation was for and it was given after we were back in the states. We were stationed in Whidbey Island in Washington and reforming when we received it. Then we ended up in the Aleutians but the unit citation was for the operation the Pacific in the area of Australia and Dutch Indies. When we got to the Aleutians, I received a new pilot, Lieutenant Senior Grade Thomas Maurer,

who later became the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps after the war. I don't know whether he is still living or not. We were then stationed in San Francisco for a few weeks, and that was a very pleasant place to be. I was between tours of duty to the Aleutians and back. We were also stationed in Washington State at Whittaby Island. So we were moving back and forth. Two tours of duty in the Aleutians.

A long time waiting assignment, which was very pleasant in San Francisco. I remember when we were coming back from, I believe it was the second tour of duty, we were ending up the second tour of duty in the Aleutians and flying from Matu, where we had been there three weeks patrolling as the infantry was mopping up the Atu. Almost all of the Japanese soldiers were either killed or ended their own lives, and when we were coming back, our plane developed engine trouble over one of the islands on the way back to Dutch Harbor and crashed, due to a mechanical malfunction, but we were close to the beach.

The thing was that a gas line left one of our engines starved and we got close to the beach, so we put out the life raft and put provisions in it to go ashore when the plane ran on the rocks and tore the bottom of it and dumped us in the drink. Then we landed on the beach with no supplies, no food. We were at one end of the island and I think there was a radio message sent out so that the people back in the Dutch harbor knew what happened to us. I didn't know it but I guess the officers, pilots, Lieutenant Jolly and I don't remember who the other names were. They got instructions to make a forced march from one end of the island, which, I don't know, 25-30 miles from the point where we crashed and where a PT boat would rendezvous with us on the other end of the island.

So we marched, and we stayed that night on the shore with no food. I guess we marched probably 15-20 miles. Now we walked over some pretty rough terrain and to the spot on the north shore south where the PT boat was. Now we joined up and the PT boat was pretty small so it was crowded and the sea was rough. So it was quite a long ways from this island to the Dutch harbor. Now that was probably the scariest adventure in the war. Now I stayed in touch with my family by writing them a couple of times a month and we would receive cookies, cakes, and letters in return. We also

had a couple of leaves. That's the way we stayed in touch, leaves and letters. Usually when I had leave I would travel from San Francisco up to Chicago on the Amrak I think to visit my family most of the time. I can't count how many leaves I had when I went to see them. I forgot to mention this before, but I had a leave one time and I was driving across country with some of my friends who graduated from the mechanics school in Norfolk, Virginia, where we went from the Enterprise to Chicago. Then I had one leave where I traveled to Idaho, and that's all the leaves I can remember that I had. I also did have seven or eight notebooks pretty filled up all the way from December the 7th until the end of the war

in 1945. Sometimes there were events that were missing because things for me were too busy these days or my memory would fail me, so that's why those dates didn't get written down. I was discharged from Minneapolis, Minnesota, and I knew the government was working on a program for GIs if they haven't been to college already, could go to college and further their education. So I opted to take the government up on that by going through the procedure, and since I had family and folks in Chicago, I had to take location into consideration when making my choice to put in. I eventually applied and started college education at DePaul University in 1945, just a month or so after the

war ended. I began the fall term at DePaul University enrolling in a liberal arts program. I graduated in 1950. The war was over in 45. I think it took me an extra six months. That's why it was 1950. I graduated in the class of 1950 with a liberal arts degree and a major in English because I wanted to be a journalist. I always thought the same thing about war, which is that there shouldn't be any wars. I would say that I had a checkered career because I try to do many great things. I was an editor for a lot of companies right after the war and even before the war they had what they called house organs and they were done for the benefit of the employers. Some companies were very large and they had quite extensive staffs just devoted to the house organ so I did that for a couple of

years. I also tried selling, not successful. I also tried with a couple, a man and a wife who had a marionette show that they took around the country and I booked the show for grade schools in Indiana and Illinois for a year or so and one half of the man and wife team died in that end of the show. After that I became a reporter for a small town newspaper, a photographer and a journalist. I was always a little leery when reading or talking about wars, to be darn sure that everyone isn't right or everybody isn't wrong, and there should be a lot more negotiation instead of conflict. Well, I guess if I hadn't gone into the service, I never would have gone to college for one thing and took a different direction altogether. I would have been out there farming.

Not that there's anything wrong with farming but I changed from being a farm boy to being a city boy which a lot of people did. I also did a lot more reading about a lot more things than I ever would have done if I hadn't been in the service. I thought I met a lot of good guys in the service and made a lot of friends. Also, I thought and still think that maybe we were all ready for the experience. Well, my friends, I hope you enjoyed that Veteran Day special. I hope those stories of all the veterans had touched your heart in the same manner it touched mine.

I didn't want to censor anything in this video because I really wanted people to understand the sacrifice and the horror that people saw in the face of war. I pray that we never have to go through anything like that ever again as a world population, I suppose, but as they say, war never ends. And if there's anything you can learn from this. Maybe, maybe, at the very least,

we can appreciate those who have given and sacrificed everything for our freedoms. And hopefully we can differentiate between certain necessities in life and whether or not they're worth fighting for, and the differences between good and evil, if there really is any.

Well friends, thanks for listening, and if you enjoyed these, perhaps down the road, maybe even earlier the next year, we can get in contact with other veterans and discuss their stories. I appreciate you sticking through this, and thank you guys all so much for the support of the channel. May God bless you and your family and all of the veterans out there that have served us thus far and continue to serve us every day. Good night.