I have decided to compile an audio record of some of my family's military history. I guess you could call it an audio documentary, though I would almost consider it more of an oral history. The idea was first developed for a class. We have to create a 5-8 minute audio documentary. I was going to attempt to cover this history  in that amount of time. The difficulty being: as I devoted more thought to it, I became almost instantly aware of the fact that with that time constraint I would have little time to do more than briefly introduce each family member. At which point I decided that I would devote a segment of similar length to each member of my family.

That was my plan as I headed in to my first interview with my grandfather a veteran of the Second World War. I started the interview as one normally does asking for him to identify himself, give his age and a short background. He started with what I asked for and then continued telling the stories of his military career for the next two hours without me having to ask another question. It was fantastic! The stories were enthralling, (at least to me) so I just sat and listened.

As I was leaving the interview I found myself wondering how I was going to possibly condense two hours' worth of stories into a single segment. To do any sort of justice to it would be impossible, so I decided to narrow my scope again. So for the first installment of this oral history I have chosen a single episode from my Grandfather's time in the Pacific Islands.