For Veteran's Day...
My uncle and dad ...
This was taken in 1943 - my father, on the right, quit high school to join the Navy after Pearl Harbor. He was seventeen. My uncle John, two years older, was already in the ROTC at UC Berkeley. They met up in the Bay Area when my father had shore leave and had this and several other pictures taken for my grandmother. I think my father felt he had to join up in order to keep up with his older brother; he always had a much harder time in school and always felt as if he had to compete with him.
Shortly after, my father shipped out to the South Pacific, including Midway and Okinawa. His ship, the USS Stormes, was hit by a kamikaze at one point. My grandmother always told the story of how one night, she woke up screaming, and realized later it was the same moment my father's ship had been hit.
My uncle served in the reserves until he retired from a long career as a high school math teacher, along with my aunt, also a math teacher. He passed away in 1999, of heart problems no one in his family knew he had - he also had Parkinson's and apparently chose not to go that route. My grandmother was heartbroken; although he was elderly, she outlived him by several years.
My father has been retired from the aerospace industry for nearly 20 years and is enjoying teaching his nine-year-old grandson about those historic times when he served his country. Gareth now wants to be a pilot (and an astronaut, and a scientist, and a marine biologist, and a veterinarian...)