goosebumps and a gun, part one

Ok, so last post I alluded to some Nazi paraphernalia. Here's my story.

My husband and I love history. He's into WWII, Winston Churchill, and the Founding Fathers. I like the Civil War, the months and years leading up to the Revolutionary War, and WWII. He likes to read about the events and the military leaders, and I like to know about the events leading up to the events. We both like Greek history. It makes for some fun conversations, like the time we spent two hours discussing the role of airplanes in combat, how it changed from primarily observation to one of the more important aspects of warfare. Light conversations like that ...

Anyway. We both have a very strong military presence is our families. John's father was a captain in the Army and tank commander in Vietnam, and his paternal grandfather was in the Army Air Corps in WWII. My maternal grandmother was an Army brat; her father served in WWI, and her older brother was a pilot in WWII (he was shot down over Italy, and MIA for several months. He made is back to safety eventually. I don't know how. I need to learn the details of that story ... but I digress). My maternal grandfather was a pilot in the Air Force during the Korean War. He flew atomic materials. That used to be classified, and he had Top Secret clearance. But it's been declassified since then, so don't worry. You won't get busted for reading this. :)

And now we come to my paternal grandfather. He was a combat engineer in the infantry in the Army in WWII. That means that he was one of the guys responsible for all the construction stuff. Need to get a bunch of heavy stuff over a river? Call the combat engineers, they'll get you a bridge built. Need a landing strip where airplanes don't normally land? They've got it covered. He served (in this order, I think) in England, France, Belgium, North Africa, and Germany.

{Cool side note: he was on a ship, headed for the Pacific theater, after he left Germany. The ship was passing Gibraltar when the captain came over the loudspeaker: Lads, Japan has just formally surrendered. We will be altering our course at this time. Our new destination is New Your City. You can imagine how excited everyone on board was ... especially considering how things had been going in the Pacific!}

When he was in Germany, things were pretty much done there. At one point, he on security detail for a visiting VIP. He and the other men with him were given the task of clearing out an area: making sure there were no bad guys or land mines or guns or knives or boogey monsters or falling tree limbs or Mad Cow-laced beef. (I totally made those last few up, in case you were wondering.) And while he was on that detail, he found something that he kept and had shipped back home ...

And I'll tell you tomorrow what it was, and how it ended up at my house last weekend ...