Toward the end of World War II, Navy plane mechanic Bob Ernst was stationed at Kaneohe Bay near Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, helping assemble Lockheed PV-1 Venturas that had been shipped in parts from the U.S. mainland for use in the Pacific. Before arriving there, Ernst already had about three [...]

William “Bill” Wilcox doesn’t dump his storied history on you all at once (to get it, you have to coax pieces out one at a time), nor does he ever stray from meek when telling it. His voice keeping soft, his hearing working against him, Wilcox eventually steers into his [...]

Nafeh Kurdi remembers the images of splattered red after the bombs fell. “It was very hard for me to see the blood on the floor,” the 20-year-old from Syria said. Amid the gruesome fighting in Syria, the strike had hit Kurdi’s university in Damascus, the country’s capital. It, plus his [...]

The date is Nov. 20, 1944, and Charles Earnest is helping run telephone line from a barn that’ll serve as a regimental headquarters for the 26th Infantry Division. The Allies are advancing deep into Europe, and the 26th is set up in Northeastern France, relatively close to the German border, [...]

In his Gainesville home, Tilden Counts Booth rocks in a living-room chair as he walks through his 10 decades on Earth. Behind him on the kitchen bar is a dispenser for his go-to candy, M&Ms, and tacked above are cards from his 100th birthday celebration in August. As he details [...]

It’s the night of Dec. 6, 1941, and Cass Phillips and friend Bruce Smithy are winding down the Saturday evening out with two lady pals. The two men, quite new to adulthood, are Navy radiomen for PBY Catalina seaplanes, which take off and land aquatically and patrol for enemy boats [...]