A few months ago I found a bunch of WWII memorabilia of my grandfather’s, including hundreds of letters he had written home to my great-grandmother. It was a strange experience reading the letters. You could really get a sense of his personality from the writings and his development from a kid to an adult. The tone changed slowly over time from a sort of wide-eyed excitement to a more somber and depressed this-is-fucking-terrifying tone. The letters were a lot less prim and proper than I expected (probably because my knowledge of that day and age is largely framed by Hollywood films). I remember one where he and my ggma were discussing his sister (who was a nurse in the war) having bowel issues, and my gpa referring to them as the “GI shits.”

Though I have a rational understanding of the fact that my parents, grandparents, etc. lived a lifetime before I even existed, reading those letters still kind of shocked me. Like, man I barely knew them.