Dad's Army experience was...happily...not blood and guts.
He turned 18 in 1945, late enough as it turned out to miss combat.
He was training in Georgia for the invasion of Japan when the war ended.
As he remembered it he was drilling with a flame thrower...ugh...when news of the surrender came.
He was sent instead to Germany, in a medical company assigned to the site of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp...probably best known today as the place where Anne Frank and her sister died.
There were displaced persons with no place or in no condition to go.
There were German prisoners of war.
And there were, as always, the civilians...who did nothing to author the war but had to live with it's consequences.
In conversation with Dad's Army friends I learned they called him the Pied Piper. He was drawn to the most innocent of those civilians, the children...and they to him.
A shared ration, a candy bar, a little horseplay...to Dad these children were no different from those he left behind in the Hill.
That was part of him his whole life. Whatever his flaws...and though I love him with all my heart he had many...he doted on children.
Underneath a hardened exterior shaped by abandonment and childhood in a tough, impoverished neighborhood remained the heart of that child.
Nothing angered him more than cruelties...even small ones...to children.
So he didn't help save the world for democracy...whatever the hell that means...but I like to think he struck a small blow for humanity.
I don't know if the young girl in this picture is still among the living. She's probably about the age of my mother, so she might be.
If she is, I hope today she still remembers that kindly young American soldier in Germany.
On this Veterans Day remember...soldiers carry things lot more important than guns.