Greetings

If by chance this is the first time you have stumbled across this blog perhaps an explanation is in order.

My dad, Teddy Stone McAnally was drafted in December of 1952.  He like many of his generation was not eager to go, but back then the alternatives and consequences of not going were socially unacceptable and more criminal than now.  He went albeit a reluctant warrior.

He mailed my grandmother, his mother, a letter almost everyday while he was in the army and she seems to have kept them all.  He later went through them and put them in chronological order and upon his death bequeathed them to me. 

They sat around my house for a few years with out me looking them over until I retired.  I began to read them and found them interesting from several view points.  One, I was able to gain some insight into what he was thinking about and how he looked at things when he was a 24 and 25 year old man.  I got a little feeling about how it must have been to be swept into a conflict a world away that he had no idea why it was happening and how the army operated back then.  He also provided some social history of Korea during the occupation, how the GI's felt and what he thought about things going on back home.  There were also some family matters that given his perspective then became more clear to me today.

A friend of mine kept encouraging me to start a blog based on something similar he had read about concerning WW I from a guy in England.  The task seemed a little daunting but eventually I got my grandson to help me figure out how to blog so I began.

The first few entries are a little confusing because some of the letters if read as posted are not in order, but I eventually got the hang of it and later on even posted some pictures.  I decided not to do any editing so what is read is what was and how it was written.  Dad though pretty smart was not a literary giant.

So there you are.  Probably the only ones that may find any of what dad wrote will be family members and some hardcore social and military historians, but they are a treasure to me.