A Common Soldier
Description:... A Common Soldier is a true story, told by a single American warrior during the North African and Italian campaigns of World War 2. It could have been the story of hundreds of thousands of other young Americans who were snatched from their families, jobs and schoolhouses and cast into the most terrible ordeal ever in the history of mankind. No training could have adequately prepared these young people, many, if not most, still teenagers, for the sights, sounds and smells they would experience. Above all, the sheer terror of not knowing if they would live to see their loved ones again or even if they would see the sun come up tomorrow was with them continually. They watched in horror as their buddies were blown to pieces by mortar and artillery fire, or mortally wounded by machine-guns. What could they do? Their commanders said "Go!" and they went, many times to their certain death. Control of their own lives was cruelly taken away from them.Today, only a few of the men and women who experienced this epic-horror are still alive today. In a few short years, they will all be gone, taking to their graves the stories of the hell-on-earth that was World War 2. I have captured some of the many stories I heard throughout out my lifetime from the soldier who is the subject of this book: my father. He was a gentle man who could never have imagined himself harming a fellow human being, much less killing someone. After being shot at nearly every day, badly wounded a few times and seeing his crew members and friends killed and maimed, his attitude necessarily changed. By the end of the war, he was a hardened soldier, but like most of his comrades, he would quickly put the memories of the war and the feelings he had for his enemy away as best he could and assimilate into the world he would reenter after the artillery shells and bombs were no longer in the air. But, like so many others, these memories were never really erased. The thought of killing another man troubled my father until the day he died.This book is intended to capture the ferocity, and the horror of war and to describe the extraordinary sacrifices our common soldiers made every day. This was not a video game, nor was it a gentleman's war. World War 2 was humankind at his worst. Eighty million people died as the result of it, most being old men, women and children. Nearly 35% of the casualties of World War 2 were in the Soviet Union - twenty-five million people; unimaginable in today's world of peace, prosperity and unlimited potential. But could it ever happen again? The lesson we should learn from the events of World War 2 is that too much power in the hands of a few can lead to such things. As my father would say, these few make promises to their people that only a war can keep. Albert Einstein famously predicted, "I don't know how World War 3 will be fought, but World War 4 will be fought with sticks and stones." We must never let it happen.
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