Tanks for the Memories 2: The Hospitality Room

Have you ever been to the reunion of a military outfit? If you have, you'll know how easily a conversation can start out on a subject like food or sports, and then transition to the Battle of the Bulge or the flat on Mount Suribachi. Aaron Elson went to a reunion of the 712th Tank Battalion from World War II in 1987 hoping to find veterans who remembered his father, who died seven years earlier. He found three, and was so moved by the stories the veterans shared among themselves, yet rarely told their families, that he returned two reunions later with a tape recorder and never missed another reunion. Long before "Saving Private Ryan" and "The Greatest Generation" got an aging population of World War II veterans to open up about their experiences, these men shared stories with Elson that covered the width and breadth of the human experience, stories of courage, of fear, humorous stories, stories of fate, of romance, of food, of booze, of being chewed out by General George S. Patton. While Elson has conducted many individual oral history interviews with World War II veterans, the stories shared in the hospitality, sometimes corroborating other stories, sometime conflicting, have always been special.

About the Author :
Aaron Elson has been a newspaper copy editor/headline writer/page designer for almost fifty years. He began interviewing World War II veterans in 1987 after attending a reunion of his late father's tank battalion. He self-published his first book, "Tanks for the Memories: An Oral History of the 712th Tank Battalion From World War II," in 1994. Three years later, he launched the World War II Oral History web site, where he posted many of the stories and interviews he recorded. His work has been used as source material in more than a dozen documentaries, including "The Color of War" and "Patton 360," and in more than two dozen popular books about World War II. He also has produced more than a dozen Oral History Audiobooks, featuring excerpts from his original interviews, in the veterans' own voices. He also has written a book about Mathew Caruso, the namesake of the Caruso Chapel at Marine Camp Pendleton. Sergeant Caruso was a chaplain's assistant who sacrificed his life to save the chaplain during the breakout from the Chosin Reservoir in the Korean War. Six days after he was killed, Mathew's son was born. Elson's most recent book is "Tanks for the Memories 2: The Hospitality Room," which he describes asw a stand-alone sequel to his very first book, "Tanks for the Memories."