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Most likely there was a huge difference in that regard in navy vs army...

I'm guessing that the reason this was downvoted was that I communicated poorly. Here is a better wording of what I was trying to say:

In the Navy you sink a ship from far away. It's more abstract; you don't see the enemy up close.

In the Army you fight battles face to face with the enemy, and it must be correspondingly more horrible.

So I would guess that Navy people (like my grandpa) had a generally more positive memory of the war than Army people.

I don't know - naval warfare in WW2 could be pretty grim.

I can recommend Nicholas Monsarrat's "Three Corvettes" on his wartime naval experiences - I happened to buy this without knowing much about the book in Heathrow before a flight over the North Atlantic to the US. One of the relatively small number of books that has moved me to tears.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Monsarrat

He also wrote the novel "The Cruel Sea" which was made into one of the best naval war movies of WW2.

It could be because pretty much all branches have ground deploy-able forces so it isn't necessarily true that they aren't exposed to the horrors of war on a person to person level.

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