One sad & one humorous story.
A Major who was a friend of my fathers used to cry and tell about his friend when he got drunk. He and a childhood friend went to West Point together. They had been buddies all their lives. The Major's friend had saved his life on at least one occasion. One day the Major was in charge of evacuating about 500 men from a position being subjected to intense artillery fire. His friend had been mortally wounded (gut wounds), but was conscious. The major ordered stretcher bearers to put an unconscious man with a minor scalp wound on a stretcher. His friend begged to be put on the stretcher instead. The major just turned away. He made the correct military decision by saving the man who would recover, but he could never forget that his friend died feeling betrayed.
The vaguely humorous story was told to me by man who was old when I was a boy. When he was a young man, he knew a man named Hank who was missing one leg at the knee. Hank told stories about losing the leg in some various heroic ways during the Civil War. The stories were all different. One day, the young man told Hank he knew he was lying, and wanted to know what really happened. Hank said that he did not think adults believed his stories, but wanted to amuse the young children who listened to him. He said the real story was that he was 13 and lived near a battle field. He saw cannon balls rolling along a road that passed by his house. He thought they were moving slowly and decided to stop one. He put his foot through a steel picket fence in front of a cannon ball. It might have been moving slowly, but it weighed a lot. His knee joint was demolished, and the doctors at the time could do nothing but amputate it.