This seems like a good place to leave a few memories of some WWII vets.

My grandfather fought in WWII under Patton, at the battle of the bulge and a lot more. It really messed him up. I've posted about him before. After he passed away in the 1980s, I became friends with two of his old army & engineering friends, Sam and Ernie. I was a teenager, and my mom and grandmother would go to lunch once a week with a group of adults and bring me along, and Ernie and Sam were there. I was interested in science, and they were both engineers. As a young teenager I was always trying to come up with a way to make a perpetual motion machine. Every week I'd come at them with a new idea, and they would educate me in why it wouldn't work. I think I learned most of my basic physics from them that way.

I remember around 2002 I had a conversation with Sam about the war. He didn't talk about the battles much, but he was keen to tell me about the fun he and his buddies had looting a pub basement full of beer barrels in Germany. I asked if he was afraid of getting in trouble for that (good luck trying that in the army now), and he said it was just a very different time.

Here's to you, Ernie and Sam!