Happy New Year from Mollie’s War.   We had a wonderful 2017 traveling across the state of Illinois.   We have traveled from Antioch to Sandwich to Crete to Rock Island to Mount Vernon and all places in between. We’ve seen parts of Illinois that we didn’t know existed.   We truly have a beautiful state—from the River Walk along the Mississippi in Rock Island to the working windmill in Fulton to the historical sites in Mount Vernon.  For the first time we traveled out of Illinois to Milwaukee and presented a program at the VA Medical Center in Milwaukee.

We met such interesting people including a gentleman who was one of five brothers who served in WWII and everyone came home!  Many women talked about female relatives–mothers and aunts– who served in WWII and in fact woman talked about an aunt who served as the head of the WACs in the 1960s.  Another gentleman talked about serving during WWII on a aircraft carrier in the Pacific when he was 17 and how he aged to 90 in just 10 days.   But he said he would do it over again!   A WWII Veteran who landed on Normandy in the first wave told his first-hand account of the landing and driving a jeep. One woman talked about growing up in Iowa, seeing the WACs as they drilled (at Fort Des Moines) and how the WACs would go to church in the neighborhood.   There are just so many stories!