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Aaktung Aaktung, welcome to We Have Ways of Making You Talk.

With me, Al-Mari and James Holland, and we are delighted to have a very special guest with us today.

James, who has found their way onto the podcast and I can quite believe we've managed this. This is wonderful.

We have Tom Lacey, who is a veteran of the 1999 Infantry Division, who and the 1999

managed to get over to Europe. They landed, I believe, in kind of early November 1944,

were immediately transferred to the front line and before they'd literally dug their first foxhole,

the Battle of the Bulge of Began, and Tom was involved in that, and then right through to the end of the war.

And Tom, it's wonderful to have you with us. Thank you.

Nice being here.

And I always think it's interesting, you know, we think of the United States as being such a modern place

with all the mod cons of the world and all the rest of it, and it kind of seems like it's always been the case.

But growing up in the 1920s and 1930s, I mean, you know, some tough times in America.

I mean, where were you brought up?

I was born in Huntington, Indiana. Then we moved to Indianapolis, and I was there until the third grade.

And then my father was got a new job in Chicago.

We, it's the very first part of the third grade.

We moved to Wheaton, Illinois.

It's a suburb on the west side of Chicago, about 30 miles to the west.

But that's where I had moved my upbringing.

I'm sorry. Did you have brothers and sisters and so on?

Yes. I had two brothers and three sisters. So we were a family of six children.

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