A Soldiers Account

Ever since I could remember I had always wanted to be a soldier, I would listen to my Father's Stories about when he was fighting in the Spanish-American war in 1898. Not all the stories were good ones, the reason I wanted to be a soldier like my Father wasn't the stories of the killing and the horror's he saw, but the fighting next to the men he called Brothers.

I was born a year after the Spanish-American war ended, My Father after the war and shortly after me being born opened his own bakery shop. When I was sixteen years old I had joined my Father to work in the bakery shop, it was 1915. Then a in 1917 when I was the age of eighteen I had enlisted in the military, three years after the start of World War I. I had only a month of training before I was deployed to the front lines of the war, the Americans had taken heavy casualties and they needed fresh men to replace them, I was scared the first time I killed someone I had thrown up, but what I remembered the most was like the stories my Father had told me about fighting along side my fellow soldiers my brothers in arms.

After the war ended in the year 1918, I was sent home and started to work back at my Fathers bakery, my stories I told to my family was much of the same as my Fathers stories, the same ones that made me enlist and become a soldier like my father. I had never lost those memories from the war matter of fact they never left my mind they were etched in my dreams forever, sometimes good dreams, but some dreams that made me wake up screaming, no matter what I had seen during the time of war, I will never forget the men I had fought next to during the war.

That wasn't my only nightmare in the same year I had returned home and began working with my father again, he had died from a heart attack, which made me have to take over the bakery shop, then what even made my heartache worse an influenza out break at swept the country in the same year and that is when I also lost my Mother to this outbreak. I had to believe in my own mind that my mom truly did not die of the influenza but of a broken heart due to losing my Father.

For eleven years I had ran my Fathers bakery with very good success, in those eleven years I had met my wife Renata and had two kids one boy and one girl. My success didn't last long in the year 1929, the year of the Great Depression I was thirty years old at this time, when the stock market crashed, I ended up losing my Fathers Bakery to it , a lot of businesses at that time had went down, and like others I had to find odd jobs to be able to feed my family, instead of living in a house which we also lost, we lived in the streets like many others at the time.

Four years later Franklin D Roosevelt our president at the time created a government reform bill which was known as the New Deal. This New Deal helped me and my wife Renata reopen my Fathers Bakery and helped get our home back so my kids can have roof over there head. I was thirty four years old at that time, I was able to run the bakery , until I had retired and handed over to my son at the age of seventy years old.

Now at the age of eighty years old I sit in my rocking chair on my porch, in front of the house that me and my wife Renata owns now, I reflect back on my life and even though I went through the struggles and hard times , I'm happy because I survived I have a beautiful wife and beautiful kids, and if wasn't going through those struggles, I wouldn't have these memories especially when I was a soldier and fighting next to my Brothers in arms.