He titled his diary "WWII: Bill Evans' Small Part," and he confesses the 30 months he served in North Africa and Europe didn't change much in his life.

Evans worked at the Shenango Valley Water Co. for four years before he was drafted by the Army in the spring of 1942. After he earned three battle stars and an honorable discharge, he worked there for another 46 years, including 20 as president.

Don't let the title and his seemingly unassuming life fool you.

Added together, the "small" efforts of Evans and hundreds of thousands other United States veterans changed the course of world history.

Each of them has a story and Evans, a Sharon native, recently became the first Mercer County veteran to record his wartime chronology for the Library of Congress. The audiotape of his experiences will be sent to Washington, D.C., as part of the Veterans Oral History Project before the dedication of the WWII memorial on the National Mall next year.

"I think when you're in the service," Evans said from his Hermitage home, "you learn to appreciate so much of what you had as a civilian. You also learn to appreciate what the armed services mean to this country."

Early in the morning of Oct. 31, 1942, at age 22, Evans boarded a train at the old Pennsylvania Railroad Station on Railroad Street in Sharon to begin a journey that would take him to Tunisia, Algeria, Italy and Switzerland.

More than three years later, he departed a train at the same station to return to a civilian life that produced five children, three grandchildren and four stepgrandchildren.

In between, he skirted death on several occasions, took college courses in Florence, helped fire propaganda shells at the Nazis on Christmas Eve in 1944, and celebrated the end of the war in grand style.

Evans has few regrets about his years as a radio operator on a forward observer team while a member of the 454th Anti-Aircraft Artillery Battalion and the 1125th Armored Field Artillery Battalion.

He has returned to Europe since his discharge, but he still has not seen Rome, despite spending a few nights there in a camp across the street from the Coliseum. His view of the landmark was obstructed and he was unable to leave the camp before leaving the city.

The highlight of his years in the Army was a trip to a remote village in northwestern Italy with a classmate while on break from his college courses. Except for a Nazi jeep that drove through the area for a look around, Evans said the village was seemingly unaffected by the war.

Those memories constitute one man's experiences, among hundreds of thousands of others, to the history of the United States military.