I've only known a few veterans, including a couple from World War II and one from the Vietnam conflict. None wanted to talk about their memories.

My only military experience was as an Air Force Reservist, who with the other 2,000 guys and gals in his troop carrier wing was scared stiff when called up for the Cuban missile crisis.

It turned out that Cuba and the Soviets backed down, we didn't invade Cuba, and we reservists were sent home. I never saw combat action of any type, and I'm happy that I didn't.

I almost reenlisted and headed for 20 years with the Air Force, but our outfit was going to be reorganized, and I had been through one reorganization already -- endless days of tearing out old pages from big, really big, and thick, notebooks and replacing them with new pages. Now, I'm certain, all that reorganizing must be done via computer so no poor armed services person has to do all that silly page replacing.

But the thought of all that paperwork made me say, "no," to reenlisting.

Had I stayed in, I would likely have been in Vietnam.

I remember one Vietnam vet, who didn't want to talk about his experiences. He was friendly but depressed at times, was quiet, and his serious demeanor expressed volumes of what he had been through. A friend, who knew him better than I did, said at times he had nightmares.

My father-in-law had been a World War II veteran, and he refused to talk about it. Like the Vietnam vet, he was quiet, had kind of a negative attitude, and wanted to put his military memories totally out of his mind. I doubt that he ever did.

I got to know another World War II vet better. Bob told me that for him, his World War II experience was typified by his having sat under a bridge in Europe with a machine gun (I'm not a gun expert, so I'll leave it at that.) and waited for German soldiers to walk under the bridge from the other side, toward him.

His job was to aim at them, shoot them, kill them.

"These weren't ‘the enemy,'" he said to me. "These were young men, just like me, walking toward me."

"I had to kill them," he concluded.

I sometimes wonder why the American Civil War remains so popular for people to read and view movies about and visit the battlefields. I think it is some strange fascination with that awful, awful war's occurring here on our own soil. I remember the Gettysburg battlefield, wandering around on a sunny day and looking at the statues dedicated to those soldiers from Maine, who that July day saw so many fellow Americans slaughtered. Too many of those from Maine were themselves slaughtered.

When I was about ten, my big brother drove us to Harpers Ferry, W.VA., where we sat on a cliff overlooking the town and saw cannon holes from the Civil War remaining in the walls of some of the buildings.

War is hell. its memory is hell, and what it does to combatants and loved ones is hell.

I can relate somewhat humorous incidents from my Air Force Reserve experience, but no one was shooting at me or setting mines or roadside bombs for me.

I remember being the leader of a half-dozen guys in our ground radio group and being out overnight with our radio shack -- a small, portable steel building powered by a gasoline generator and moved by truck or airplane -- in rural New Hampshire.

The site was obviously where local teens normally came on Saturday nights to do things teens normally did, when we weren't training there. One of our guys wanted to carry our rifle and guard the radio shack at night -- too many movies, I thought. After we discussed it awhile, I okayed the idea but first removed and the ammunition from our community weapon while he was outside doing something else.

Hey, teens should be able to come to where they normally come, be surprised by our presence, and turn around and drive away without being shot.

I remember riding in a station wagon -- no SUVs on scene yet -- out to the remote site from our temporary base with officers, who normally were pilots, to be sure we all knew where the place was so we wouldn't be left there indefinitely because no one could find us. After all, how long could those teens be put off from their normal activity.

I learned that these pilots and a Maine National Guard helicopter pilot years later taking me to Sunday River with my reporter's camera to cover something or other were good at following maps of the sky but lousy at following highway maps.

On the way to the remote New Hampshire site, we turned onto an even more back road from the back road we had been following. There was a wood rail fence and an overweight lad, whom in those far-gone days you could describe as such without being labeled as a bigot, sitting on a rail. An officer wrote this occurrence as part of his directions for the next gang of officers who were scheduled to drive out to the site.

I was with the next group of officers as they drove out.

"What's this?" said the officer with the written directions in hand, "Fat boy sitting on fence?"

"Well, he was the last time I passed here," I responded.

A really experienced pilot, who flew us once to New Hampshire from the Dover, Delaware, Air Base, was known for his lack of preparation for emergencies but for his capability in handling them when they happened.

As we took off from Dover, he called back to us, "When you see the green light come on, jump."

That was reassuring. We made a purposeful attempt to never look at that light.

This pilot also flew overloaded -- with us and all our radio equipment aboard -- over New York City. He thought it was fun. We didn't.

On a trip back to Dover, we found ourselves with no oil pressure in one of the C-119's two giant engines, no radio communication because the radio had malfunctioned, and a door that didn't stay shut right until we tied it closed with some rope we found in the plane.

I didn't know how the pilot felt. That wasn't fun for me.

The helicopter pilot got lost on the way back to the Oxford airport to return a state senator and myself home after the Sunday River venture. He asked me if I knew of a lake with islands in it.

In Maine? A lake with islands in it? How silly?

I looked out the window and suggested the pilot turn left over Harrison, and soon we found our way back to Oxford.

But I never saw the real thing. Never saw dead military personnel nor dead civilians, the civilians killed by accident. I never had to dig a foxhole, never had to bail out of a burning aircraft. Never had to shoot another human.

I'm glad I didn't. I feel bad for families who lost loved ones in military operations.

I remember some of the questions posed by the Pete Seeger song, "Where have all the Flowers Gone?" that was popular in the 1960s. I recall the lyrics that then asked, "Where have all the young men gone?" and the answer that followed, "Gone to graveyards everywhere."

"When will they ever learn? Oh, when will they ever learn?" the song continued.

When will they?Milt Gross can be reached for corrections, harassment, or other purposes at lesstraveledway@midmaine.com.

Milton M. Gross Copyright 2009