Picture Perfect?

My dad had a lot of photographs from his time in the Army Air Corps. They are now all scanned into my computer - quite the time consuming task. Because they were taken and processed 65 or more years ago, without benefit of a photo lab, they are not in the best condition. So I fired up Photoshop and began the laborious process of photo restoration. Some of them need the services of a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon to give them a face lift, but I am doing the best I can with my modest knowledge of the software. As I study the photos, I wonder about the barely men with their smiles mugging for the camera. What was it like to be separated from their families, literally dropped into a world filled with poisonous snakes, blistering heat or never-ending monsoons, with malaria running rampant? Unlike today's soldiers, they had very little ability to communicate with loved ones back home. My dad and I talked quite a bit about his years of service. Unlike a lot of men of his generation, he didn't seem to mind talking about his experiences. Unfortunately, I did not take the opportunity to label the back of all the the photos stored haphazardly in an old cigar box all these years. So some of the places and subjects in the pictures will remain a secret. But I do know which ones are of him, and after all that's who the book I am writing is about.

The Memories in the Box

When my dad died my house became the repository of some of his personal stuff. My siblings and I had divided up who wanted what, clothing was distributed to Goodwill, and furniture and household items no one wanted were sold to a strange little man willing to haul it all away after we sold the house. What remained were all the photo albums, record albums, music my dad had written along with all his songbooks, and his personal papers. As the only one in the family interested in genealogy, I took all of these so that I could later sort through them. Since I was handling his estate, I needed all his financial papers anyway. Five years later, the albums remain stashed under a guest bed, his papers bulge out of my filing cabinets and I have painfully tried to remove the photographs from those nasty, self sticking, acid producing vinyl photo albums we all thought were so great when they came out in the 70's. But one box of items has poked it's ghostly fingers into my mind all these years, urging me to set the contents free. The box contains my dad's personal items from his service during World War II. Dog tags, military papers and photographs create an outline to a story just waiting for words. My dad, unlike a lot of men from his generation, did not mind talking about his military service. Unfortunately when I was younger I was uninterested in history, much less something as testosterone laden as war talk. After I began to do genealogical research and recognized the importance historical events played in shaping my ancestor's lives, I did sit down with dad and create a time line of his service years. I regret now that I did not capture some of his recollections such as the "Yankee ingenuity" which took place, enabling the soldiers to process photographs without the benefit of a darkroom and, more importantly, their improvisation to keep their beer cold. Yes, the old retrospectoscope always makes things so much clearer. I can't write what I don't remember. But I can take his memorabilia and let it speak for itself. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then there is quite a story waiting to be told.