Don Meaker:
My father was in the ‘Slave Corps”. He was drafted in early 1942 and returned home late in 1945. Much of the time he lived in a foxhole, or if he was fortunate, a tent. The food was very bad, that is, when he and his fellow slaves’ actually had food to eat. He was a lower level ‘Overseerer’, called a sergeant. As such, he not only received and obeyed orders from higher-lever ‘Overseers’, referred to as officers, he also gave orders and was responsible for the lives of his ‘slaves’. Refuse to obey orders and you could be shot. Of course, where he was you could also get shot by the Germans if you stuck your head up at the wrong time. Later in life my dad suffered serious consequences from having his left eardrum blown out by the concussion from an exploding German artillery shell. I don’t recall hearing him complain about his ‘slavery’, or much of anything else, for that matter. Dad passed on more than a decade ago, long after his generation of Americans saved the world. I miss him, as I do all those from that era who have passed.
