re: #43 Justanotherhuman

My maternal grandfather (who I never knew) was a soldier in WWI and never recovered from it. He spent the rest of his life in and out of VA hospitals (leaving my grandmother w/6 kids to raise during the Depression), and the only proof I had he ever existed was a small 2x3 hooked wool rug he had made in a VA hospital that he gave to my g-mother. She never talked about him much, but I think he had severe PTSD, or shell-shock, as they called it then, and he drank to excess. He died in 1948; he’d been a mere boy when he enlisted, and they married very young when he got back to the US—he was 18, she was 16.

I can’t imagine what he must have went through. I remember hearing a historian say that in many a way the 20th century really began the day WWI started.