. . Thomas Franus Thomas Franus of Ellwood City, Pennsylvania was almost out of the Army. One month to go and he’d be home for Christmas 1963, closing out an exhausting tour of duty with the Army’s elite Honor Guard in Washington DC. One month on an easy down slope.
. . Charlie Frank Charlie Frank, Sr. of Rochester, Pennsylvania was drafted in late 1942, picking up the 94th Infantry in Kansas for a year of training. He finally came ashore in Europe D+94 at Omaha Beach, “still littered with helmets and rifles.” Charlie and The Pilgrim Division would then endure more
. . John Francis John Francis of Blairsville, Pennsylvania was an engineering student at Penn State during WWII. Sign up to join the army now, an ROTC commander urged him, and he’d get some credit for his schooling before being drafted. It seemed like a deal. After basic and artillery
. . Michael Flournoy “I did a lot of crazy, dumb, and stupid things while in Vietnam; but none of those things were wrong,” says Pittsburgh’s Michael Flournoy of his duty in Vietnam. War is chaos. It goes against nature. “You are trained to do things that are not what
. . William Fisher When William Fisher first heard the news of an attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, he didn’t even know where it was. He enlisted in the Navy once he came of age a few years later, but it wasn’t until arriving at the Hawaiian
. . Ralph Fisher During WW II, Ralph Fisher spent thirty-one months overseas, serving in North Africa, Sicily, France, and Germany. Immediately after basic training he was placed in the Army’s 402nd Anti-Aircraft Battalion, with “not much training,” he says—a fact that might have had dire consequences for the entire
