This is maybe not as uncommon as you may think - A lot of people who served with great heroism or survived great privations in WW2 were very reticent about their roles and what had happened to them post-war. They just went back to ordinary civvy life.
In fact, many of them probably went to their grave believing that large aspects of their work were still secret - Information regarding some WW2 roles and occupations was not fully declassiffied until the end of the cold war in 1992.
In my own family, there was one dear old aunt who despite the occasional hushed whisper about something more, always maintained that she’d done nothing more than work some phones during the war. However, the full RAF honour guard at her funeral and later a 3-Tornado flypast at her ash scattering suggested she had done a tad more.
Eventually it emerged that she had worked with Robert Watson-Watt on the development of Chain Home Radar.
Two doors away from her lived an old artist - He spent the war making bombing maps for the allied air forces. Again, this did not emerge till late in his life when I showed him an old handbook on RAF cartography that I’d picked-up in a sale and he started talking and bringing out examples of his work from the time. I must have known him 20 years and apart from his wife, I was the first other person to know.
At school, I had a kindly, unassuming and frail old physics teacher - The reason for his frailty only emerged after his death. It was from wounds sustained in WW2 - when he served with the 7th Armoured Division - Monty’s famous Desert Rats:
And when I was a very young child, my parents rented a basement flat from this kind and eccentric old professor who lived upstairs. Now he had some recognition but it was not until my early teens and the publication of his autobiography that it turned out kind old Prof Jones was none other than the famous R.V. Jones:
Reginald Victor Jones - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
GREAT story Jim, very touching. You just never know who did what during their military lives. Such a long, long time ago and yet every single free person owes a debt that cannot be repaid to these remarkable brave people.
Please let this serve you as a reminder to be kind to one another. You just never know how much someone else sacrificed for you to be able to stand there and be angry at them.
To all the brave men and women in this world serving so that I can have my pheromones I thank you.