Diary Of A Soldier

Now here's a hell of a Memorial Day story that you won't soon forget:  90-year-old Laura Mae Davis visited the National World War II museum in New Orleans recently, searching for a possible mention of her former high school sweetheart killed in battle.  What she found was more than she could possibly hope for in his actual diary from seventy years ago, sitting on display.

“I figured I’d see pictures of him and the fellows he’d served with and articles about where he served,” Laura Mae Davis Burlingame told The Associated Press.

Instead, she ran face-to-face with Cpl. Thomas “Cotton” Jones’s handwriting, and the original telegraph informing his parents that he was killed by enemy fire.

In his last entry, Jones describes winning money gambling and suggests that he would like to wire it to Laura for Christmas. There were also numerous entries about how he wished he’d married her before leaving for the war, and a note asking that the diary be turned over to Laura if it were lost.
Nearly 70 years since Jones was killed by an enemy sniper, Laura was stunned to see the 22-year-old’s diary in the case before her.

When she told museum staff that she and Jones were both graduates of the class of 1941 and dated in high school, they opened the book up to look inside, making their astonishing discovery.

Amazing.  America suffered more than 400,000 troop casualties, 22 million troops casualties worldwide,  half of them Soviet, and a total death toll of some 70 million people...more than 3% of the earth's population at the time.

And now the last people who fought in and survived that war are dying or in their 80's and 90's.  Those numbers would be incomprehensible today and yet it was reality for four grueling, blood-soaked years.

Now, one of those casualties got to say goodbye, 70 years later.

Just amazing.