I read the article that Captain Jack put up about the pivotal town in the Battle of the Bulge. And it reminded me of some of the talks I was lucky enough to hear among my relatives when I was child. When I grew up in the fifties, if you threw a rock at any house, you probably would hit a Veteran. My family was rife with them, and my Best friend Eddie, all his Uncles Served too.
One conversation that came to mind was at a Family Reunion in the Seventies. Lots of Vietnam Vets were having trouble and self medicating after coming home to brutal Societal push back. Not welcomed at all except by individual families. My brother Mike's welcome home sign was vandalized while we picked him up at the airport. So a bunch of my Uncles, my Dad and a bunch of other Vets were gathered at a picnic table. I went over and asked them about what were some of the differences between the Wars.
One of the comments caught me off guard:
"Kevin, there were no suburbs, and America was not a melting pot before the War."
Well, that caught my attention. I kept asking. They kept telling me little bits of History that aren't in the books.
"Kevin, all of us (waving a beer at the table) grew up in one of two places. Either in the City, or on a Farm. Those were your two options. We were kids during the Great Depression. All of us were wiry thin, hungry most of our childhood, and would (and could) do any kind of work from manual labor to mechanical stuff.
We didn't have "old people". Most of our Dad's were gone by Fifty.
And forget that "melting pot stuff". That happened because of the War, not before it. Before I enlisted ...I had never met anyone who wasn't Irish or German. The Poles, the Italians, the Jews, the Slavs, the Irish, the Swedes...they all stayed in their own neighborhoods. The Blacks had their own part of Town, and the Puerto Ricans they brought up to work at the Tank Plants, we never saw them at all.
I never had an Italian friend until we hit the beaches in Europe. First Black guy I ever knew personally was a Cook. He carried a picture of his girlfriend back home...just like I did. And front lines were not static...so he saw as much crap as I did. World War II was the real melting pot beginning. We were already tough kids before the Army got us."
I had a lot to think about there. But it didn't stop there...because I didn't often hear their stories. Most of of my Uncles and Friends Dads ...didn't talk about the War. Or if they did, it was about something funny, or not scary. The rest, they saved those stories for the VFW.
So the subject of "coming home" came up. And again, I was surprised at how much thought these brave guys had given to what sounds so simple: coming home.
"Kevin, when we fought, you went over as a Unit. Same guys for the duration. Unless they got killed or wounded (long silence, beers lifted). Replacements came when you go short crewed. Your Brother Mike was lucky in that his Unit Trained together and went over as a Team. But most of the folks in Vietnam rotated in and out heeler skelter. You might be in Country four days, the guy who picked you up, three months, the Squad leader maybe seven months, and your bunk mate was a two digit midget and wanted nothing to do with you. It was hard to make friends.
Not us, we had been together for months, even years. Nobody came home until it was over. And you came back the way you left, with your entire Unit. And you came back by ship. So not only did it take a few months after Peace was declared to get you lined up to go home, you came home on a ship where it was just you and your buddies for three weeks. And that space gave you time to decompress. Some of us took almost a year to get back home. Time to sort through some stuff. But even the ones that got those first ships back, had weeks together before they got on the boat, and then time on the boat to figure out out how to transition back to civilian life. And that helped. We weren't in the Jungle one day, and then home at the local DQ two days later. We had time to figure shit out."

So yeah. I garnered from those talks that they were - in general- tougher folks before they got in the Service. And they had - even tho it wasn't planned, a "cooling down period" to deal with their trauma surrounded by guys who were there to talk it over with.
And I think those things were important.