OMG Moss, so was my dad, combat engineering. I think that is the right term. He was literally the tip of the spear in the first allied invasion into mainland Germany, the battle of the Rhineland. His job was to find mines and booby traps, so he went in before the troops. Him, 3 other guys on a jeep, they had intelligence of where the mine field started, so they headed out but the intelligence was wrong and actually the pending field of battled was mined much further out, the jeep ran over a mine. The driver was killed. Dad was thrown off the back, momentarily unconscious, and when he came to he saw his buddies deeply wounded and bleeding, so using their belts he put tourniquets on their arms & legs and carried them back across the mined field. Brought in one, went back out over the live mine field and got the other one. The Colonel looks at him and says, "We still gotta clear the mine field," so dad goes back out alone and clears the minefield so the allied troops could advance. He was awarded the Bronze Star for Bravery Under Fire, the Colonel would have put him in for a Silver Star which is, Bravery and Leadership Under Fire, but told him he didn't lead anybody since the others in his unit were wounded or dead, so a Bronze Star is what he was awarded.
They must have put the really smart ones in engineering and I'll tell you why I think so. This is kind of a long story and I tend to write as I talk instead of shortening it up but here goes. Dad was raised on a farm and during the war all the boys his age talked among themselves about going off to war, they all wanted to be pilots, including dad. Mothers of course did NOT want their sons going off to a foreign land to fight and die. My grandmother (not my grandfather) somehow got my dad a job on the railroad to start right after high school graduation. My dad was pissed off about that, because if you worked for the railroad this was an essential job and you stayed home and did not go off to war. He got his draft notice of course but didn't go in the military, he was exempt because of his railroad job. All his high school friends left for boot camp and he went to work for the railroad. He only worked for the railroad a few weeks, came home told his mother, "I quit! I'm going to the draft office, I'm going to be a pilot!"
He goes to the draft office and takes the written and physical exam, but he flunks the physical exam to be a pilot because of his eyesight. He tells them, "I had an eye injury on the farm, wait a few weeks and re-test me, I have good eyes, I have great eyesight, it is just an injury, it will heal, I want to be a pilot." A few days later he is working on the farm and a car pulls into the driveway, two guys get out and want to speak with dad. Before the CIA, in WWII there was an intelligence unit in the military I forget what that is called, that is who they were. They talk to dad and tell him that he tested really really high on the written test and won't he please come and work in this Intelligence Unit. They play it up a little bit how thrilling and exciting the work is, they are basically trying to recruit him, but dad sees it differently. Instead of being convinced to go into this intelligence unit he asks the guys, begs them really, if they can get the army to retest him in a few weeks for his eyes as he wants to be a pilot. So there is some back and forth, they refuse to get involved in helping him become a pilot so he tells them in a fit of pique, "If I can't be a pilot I'll be a simple foot soldier then," and sends them away, didn't join their outfit. So that is how it happened that he ended up in army engineering, an eye injury on the farm prevented him from becoming a pilot, and the army wouldn't re-test him.
Like your dad, he went to college on the GI Bill, married, had 4 kids and went on to lead an influential and successful professional career in Public Health. Like your dad, built his own house, he went to night school to learn architectural drawing so he could draw his house plans, bought the building lot at a tax sale, actually he bought two lots for a pittance. When building the house he traded a mason the other lot if he would brick the house, our dads had a bit of horse trading in them I think. I took my parents past that house about 5 years ago, we sat in the car parked in front of the house and my parent are looking at the house they built like 50 years ago and my dad says, "My God it still has the same roof! Look at that they are the same shingles. I'll never forget those shingles, I bought the heaviest shingles they made (I forget the weight but he knew what weight shingles they were) and God were those heavy carrying them up on the roof. And look, the shingles are still good!" It was a pretty pitched roof, they were the only house on the block to have built a two story, no dormers but a very tall pitched roof. One interesting thing they did on that house is, they put two small bedrooms on the second floor and a full bathroom. In that time not many people put in a second bath, but on the farm my dad had an upstairs bedroom and always had to go downstairs to use the bathroom so in his house he put a bathroom on the second floor. He tore down and old bank building and in exchange for tearing down the bank he got the lumber for all his beams and trusses and a bit more, more horse trading. My mother said the beams and rafters in the house were really big lumber and my dad said how heavy they were to carry.
