Personal accounts from both WW2 and The Great War(WW1) give rise to authors picking up their pens and writing fictional stories based off of them (my own story Where Chaos Reigns is heavily based off of personal accounts I have read in my research). However, many of us have stories of our own, of our own family who served in either WW1 or 2 or were a mere spectator to both wars. Does your family have a legacy of service in the world wars? If so, share it with us!

GREAT discussion point!!
My Aunt Mary died last summer at the age of 96. She was a registered nurse who was working in Washington in December of '41. I took her out to lunch one time and she told me how on her walk to mass every week, she would pass by the Japanese Embassy. One Sunday, she thought it was odd that the entire staff of the embassy were running around like mad, packing up vehicles and burning papers in the front yard. When she got home from church, she heard on the radio that Pearl Harbor had been attacked.

She also was married to her childhood sweetheart while he was on leave in 1944. He returned to the European front and was captured during the Battle of the Bulge. He died soon after of pneumonia in a Nazi POW camp. She was so destroyed by his death that she said she couldn't bear to stay in Boston anymore and see the places they used to go. So as a young, 26 year old woman, she packed up her car with her cat and drove all alone clear across the country to become a nurse in a hospital in San Francisco. There she met the second great love of her life, a Navy Officer, when he came home on his ship following VJ Day.

She was a pistol. Let me tell you. If she thought something, she'd say it. One time, she didn't like what I was wearing so she chirped out in the middle of Walmart, "Are those real pants or did you just paint your jeans on?" ...okay they were NOT that tight....really...

I had a great uncle (his name was Jack) who served for the Canadian Army as a dispatch rider. One story that my Nana has always told about him was this one incident where he was riding his motorcycle through some dangerous road when a German sniper shot at him. The sniper missed and the bullet ricocheted and hit him in the arse. He ended up losing control of the motorcycle because of it and wiped out in a ditch.

He lay there for quite a long time, bleeding and unable to move until some Canadian Infantry came by and picked him up out of the ditch. They told him that he was lucky they found him in time or else he would have bled out.

I never met him or even seen a picture of him but my Nana always tells me that he was a good-looking man XD

I've already discussed my mom's babysitter to Frances, but her story is amazing. Her name was Mia and she was about seventeen in '44 and lived in Wiesbaden, Germany. Her best friend was Jewish, the love of her life an American Air Force officer, and she herself was forced by the Germans to be an architectural draftswoman designing top secret sumarine bunkers, hidden V2 rocket facilities, and concentration camps. I hope to make her story a collaborative fiction piece.

Right?? Hopefully someday I'll have stories as interesting as these wonderful people!