To Hell and Gone

Jim's Story

When I met Ms. Kate Carlisle at the Kingsbridge VA in Bronx, New York, I had accidently made reference to something that was said by connecting it to an action I had in the service. When I realized I had said something I did not want to divulge, I tried to let it hang. She noticed my discomfort and said, I am very interested in things about WW2. You should write about your experiences. I think I offhandedly replied, Oh! I could write a book about my combat experiences, but I never typed anything in my life. To which she countered, You write, and Ill type! She was serious, and I wrote, and she, good to her word, kept typing and asking for more. The project ended abruptly when she was transferred to Boston to work on her PHD. It would have probably died there, but upon mentioning it to my daughter Patricia, she then provided me with an old computer and some lessons, so I had no excuse. To you who have never tried, writing is real work! Now everyone was waiting to see what the baby was going to look like. I was now in labor, and that takes time. I said this to those who had great expectations of me as a writer. The balky computer was giving me all the cover I needed to quit because, due to my ineptness, it was only operating on certain days. My son Kevin became Mr. Fix-It with the computer, and while I loved his company, I couldnt have him spend the time fixing it, so I eventually broke down and bought a new laptop with a printer. Now I was in business! Well, I found out you could play solitaire and chess on this machine as well as type. Guess what I got involved with until I got a call from Trafford publishing? Well, now I had to finish my writing. Lastly, I must acknowledge and thank all who will read this book, which spans the era from my birth in 1925, which was in the period Roaring Twenties. Then we lived through the 1930s, the Great Depression, in the worst in the history of our nation and concluded in 1945 with the end of the greatest war in history. I was honorably discharged from the army in 1946. I will give you more than a snapshot of those above events, which is a lot more than the few lines the kids get to read in their high school history books of this exhausting string of decades, including war that covered actions in five continents. What you dont often read in textbooks is the daily life and the drama it brings to ordinary people in such times. You will meet my family. They are not only of my bloodlines but my real buddies. You will read about my faith, which I love dearly and I try to live it. I really cant understand people who try to live without its benefits. We who had our lives chastised by so much life are now judged as living in a historic era and said to be of the greatest generation. As an eyewitness to those historic times and now an overripe geriatric of age 89, I only wish to put into our accumulated history what I can pass on to the greater generation of my grand- and great-grandchildren. To do this, I thought it best to start at the beginning.