General Discussion

My father was a career Marine. He had been a fighter pilot in the South Pacific in WWII, so I remember him at the time preparing to fly a plane to the US, as they thought the East Coast would be nuked, and the American military outside the country would need to be the ones to defend the country. My husband's father was career Air Force stationed at the Pentagon at the time. My husband remembers practicing nuclear bomb drills. I didn't have that worry in North Africa, but I remember being scared that I would not see my father again.

Somewhere back in my childhood I spoke to a mother of one of my friends who lived on Guantanamo at the time. She told me that in an attack, they were to move forward in their attempt to escape (ships/planes, I am not quite sure now). If their kids were behind them on the base, then they had to hope that someone would grab their kids to escape and keep moving forward to be rescued. In return, she was to grab kids nearby and keep moving to safety. How scary it must have been for military families stationed there at the time.