This is not really a diary, just some thoughts I shared on Facebook and thought I’d also share here.
First the personal.
I have a snapshot of my father aiming a rifle at the camera, taken at Ft. Bragg, and also my parents' engagement picture with him in uniform. When I was growing up, we had large brass shell casings sitting on the bookshelves, and a couple of books of a photographic history of the war (WW II). But he didn't talk about it much. He was in the Philippines, and he got partial disability for a back injury - he also had malaria, and I remember one relapse when I was a kid. He talked about things like finding out that the food served by a woman whose house the soldiers went to contained dog meat. And buying and selling black market cigarettes. He told my sister that once the guy right beside him was killed, and he was completely uninjured, which left him with a kind of fatalism. And he talked about experiencing antisemitism of the impersonal kind, since he neither looked Jewish nor had a Jewish name so the others talked openly in front of him.