I interviewed a World War II veteran once for a book about veterans a few years back. It was a fascinating experience. The veteran, named Robert, was in his 80’s and he lived in a fine house in the suburbs with his wife. The stories that he told me about the war had obviously been practiced for years and years, perhaps with his friends and family. I don’t know if he found his experiences to painful to talk about candidly or if he was just asked what he’d seen in war too many times and decided to give people a chuckle more often than anything else.

Robert told me a story about a time in 1943 when he was working on an Air Force Pilot Training Camp in Lemoore, CA serving the men after he’d just been “washed out” and in the process of being reassigned to another type of service. Instead of going home for the customary thirty-day leave after a wash out, Robert decided to make extra money serving on the base. One day in the cafeteria, a hot place without air-conditioning, the cook decided to serve lime-green mint ice cream. The ice cream was melting fast, so Robert was rushing to deliver the dessert to the men before it became bowls of soup. He had just retrieved a bowl for each hand, and was running back into the dining hall. When he returned, there was an inspection. He attempted to stand at attention. Robert turned at a 90 degree angle, bowls in hand, but as he did, a precariously balanced scoop in one of the bowls flew out of its container and onto the Colonel, a squat man who stood 5’5” in full uniform with three rows of combat ribbons on his chest. The ice cream missed the ribbons, but to Robert’s horror, it slid down to the colonel’s boots. The Colonel turned to look at Robert, who had the inextricable urge to laugh.

Not all of Robert’s experiences were so comical. Some were rather horrific, increasingly so because of their irony. After a stint at a base in Clovis, New Mexico, Robert was taking a flight back home on a commercial airliner. Back then, flights like this one were about eight-hours long, so Robert, in uniform, settled into his seat in the first row behind the pilot’s cockpit. A passenger holding onto a briefcase with a coat slung over his arm took the empty seat next to Robert’s. The two had a lot of time to kill, so they got to talking, meandering through topics like music and electronics. Through the conversation, Robert’s seatmate held onto his briefcase. After a while, Robert asked if he could put the briefcase up on the luggage rack for his seat buddy, but the other passenger said no. The fellow passenger was handcuffed to the briefcase. The other passenger started telling Robert about Enrico Fermi’s work with the atomic bomb at the University of Chicago, saying that he could trust Robert with the information because he, Robert, was a man in uniform. Soon after, the other passenger asked, “Do you know who I am?” Robert then remembered a photograph he’d seen in a physics textbook of a professor at the University of California. The man revealed that he was J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who helped develop the atomic bomb. Their conversation soon veered away from physics, however. That day, Robert learned that Oppenheimer was more than a physicist; Robert could tell that Oppenheimer was lonely.

It was kind of fascinating to interview this guy who lived just an hour from where I did during college. World War II is kind of mythical to us now—most of its veterans are dead—and Robert was no exception. I hope we successfully record all of these veterans’ stories so we don’t loose WWII more completely than we have to.