Remem­ber The Veterans—Chattanooga National Cemetery Veteran’s Day is My Father’s Day—My Old Sol­dier Endures Alabama and the Depres­sion were hard on a boy liv­ing a sharecropper’s life. He wanted out. My father, Al Green­field, was nine­teen years old, five-foot eight inches, and one-hundred and twenty pounds when he joined the Army in March 1941 for reg­u­lar food, a bunk, and a sem­blance of order and stability. He was sent to Ft. Ben­ning, Geor­gia, where Gen­eral George Pat­ton was form­ing the 2nd Armored Divi­sion, a new tank divi­sion, also known as “Hell on Wheels”. Tanks needed infantry to go with them and Daddy became a rifle­man in an infantry brigade. Infantry­men were the foot sol­diers and the bul­lets usu­ally found them first. My father took part in “Oper­a­tion Torch”, where in Novem­ber 1942 the first US … Read entire article »