Last edited Mon May 25, 2026, 11:02 PM - Edit history (1)
.... gathering. The adults were all sitting around a table, enjoying small talk while the cooker heated up to cook hot dogs and hamburgers. Some of the women were starting to uncover the dishes they had prepared. The kids were told to go off and play, dinner would be sometime soon. One of my older cousins had managed to get some firecrackers.
We were some distance away from the adults when we lit a string of firecrackers and threw them on the ground in the direction of the adult table. We wait for the anticipation for them to start going off. Within seconds of them starting to bang, bang, bang, and smoke, we noticed a commotion at the adult table. One of our soft-spoken uncles had dove under the table face down with his hands interlocked on the back of his head.
When the loud bangs stopped, we all looked over to see the other adults try to talk our uncle out from under the table. He finally came out, obviously shaken and scared. Finally, one of the adults came over to where we kids were gathered and told us No more firecrackers.
We were later told he had battle fatigue, what we now call PTSD, as he had fought and survived the Battle of the Bulge. Where many of his fellow soldiers had died.
Never again at a family outdoor cookout did we let off firecrackers.
Although many of the adults had fought in World War II, including my dad. His tour was as a radioman who spent 18 months "22" miles up the Amazon river on a clandestine radio site in the jungle intercepting German U-boat signals. I later found out it was a top-secret operation using what is now called HUFF DUFF. It used new technology to triangulate the location of the German U-boats in coordination with other clandestine radio sites all along the eastern border of South America. Once located, they would dispatch torpedo-carrying planes to attempt to sink the U-boats.
The German U-boats were in the South Atlantic Ocean hunting supply ships supporting our troops that wer fighting Rommel in North Africa.
For an actual story about the use of Huff Duff, read a 2024 book titled Codename Nemo by Charles Lachman. For more on the actual technology, read Secret Weapons (U.S. High-Frequency Direction Finding in the Battle of the Atlantic), aka Huff Duff, written by Kathleen Broome Williams, 1996
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