🧵I have to share this with yall. I’m with my mother & I go into the gas station and I see this real old white man walk in. Walking slow and gingerly. I happen to look up at his hat and it said “World War 2 veteran”. I’m like wow. Normally when I see people with veteran hats on
I thank them for their service. And I was going to do that here. But I got distracted, laughing and joking with another customer and I forgot. So as I get back in my car, I see the guy walk back out, slowly, to pump his gas. I pull back around to tell him thank you 4 his service
At first I’m in the car and he can’t hear me, not even looking my way. So I pull over and get out and walk up to him and say “I just want to thank you for your service.” He looks at me, and he says “I want to tell you something. You got a minute?” I say yes sir.
He starts telling me about this all black battalion in the war. He says “they kept them separated from us and that was wrong”. And he tells me that they were great fighters and they destroyed Nazi tanks at even a higher rate than the white guys. He says
“The Germans wanted to know who were these guys.” He said that found out and captured them. He says “the Germans cut their eyes out, cut their hands off and killed them.” And as he’s telling me this I still see the pain and anger in his eyes. Like he’s back on the battlefield.
He tells me “I captured Germans, I held them prisoner. I never killed anybody. I didn’t know what they did until later. Had I known what they did to those black guys, I would’ve killed every last f**king one of them.” Looking in his eyes I knew he meant every word.
This man was 96 years old and you could tell that he was still so angry about what the Nazis did. He tells me “there’s not a lot of guys like me left from that war.” I said “God bless you.” He says “He did. I don’t know why, but He did.”
As I shook hands with him one more time and get back in my car and I’m pulling away, trying to emotionally process all of that, it was a reminder to me: THIS is who we are. To see this old white man enraged all over again as he thinks about how the Nazis treated black soldiers
that really had an impact on me. What mattered to him was that they were Americans. They were soldiers. They were his countrymen. That was powerful. All of this at the gas station lol. My goodness. God bless you sir. /end
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