re: Saving Private Ryan gripe

I attended my gradfather's funeral a few months ago. He was 95. Landed at Normandy on D-day plus four, and served all the way to the end.

He never talked about any of his experiences. He never attended a single reunion of his regiment. He asked that there be no military presence at his funeral. He kept no mementos. Not a box in the attic. Not his medals. Nothing.

I asked my grandmother why it was this way. She said for two reasons. One was that his company experienced 150% casualties in 10 months. All the guys he trained with and landed with were dead or wounded by the end of the war.

The second was that after being in combat for so long, his unit was eventually rotated to the rear. When the Germans started really surrendering en masse after the Bulge, they turned his unit into an MP/Prisoner escort company. But apparently there was a bit of a scandal when none of the prisoners assigned to them ever made it back behind the lines.