Best Not Left Alone
Heroes Remember
Best Not Left Alone
Interviewer: You're in the darkness and you're fighting a battle.
Tell me a little bit about the people beside you, how you worked
together, as the team, the team concept when you were out there.
Well, it depends on if you were part of a mortar crew or part of
the machine gun crew. Like if you're the machine gunnist, or
machine gunner you're running the machine gun, or if you're
the helper, you're carrying the ammunition and that you feed the
ammunition in the machine gun and you help them load it and set
it up and all of this sort of thing. And likewise, if you're on
the mortar crew, so you're always with somebody and that was
a good feeling. It was terrible if you got in a situation where
you were by yourself. That was pretty hard to take, cause you
always felt more comfort with somebody else.
Interviewer: And this was a stranger, but then it became your teammate...
This is why soldiers become such good friends. You know,
you depend on one another for your life and for his life.
So that's how you become so closely attached.
Interviewer: And those people you don't forget.
And when you lose somebody, you know, this is very devastating
to you because you've lost your protector sort of thing and
likewise for the other people. So it's, you really, really depend on one another.
Getting into Agira, myself and Lieutenant Swan
and four, yeah I believe it was four other guys, left our
position about midnight and we walked ‘til daylight to get around
on the enemy side of the town of Agira. Agira is up, right up on
a high mountain again. Everything is on, right at the top of
mountains. And we arrived there just at day break and the
Patricia's were starting to enter the town of Agira, and the
Germans were trying to retreat out and we were sitting,
looking down on them, and firing on them as they run out,
trying to escape. I, I don't remember how many we shot there or
who shot any, you know but, you could see them falling and that
and you knew that our, some of us were hitting them.
But it doesn't seem to effect you if there's a bunch of people
firing, you don't know who hits the guy that has fallen so that
doesn't seem to bother you as much, as if you know
that you shot the man yourself, you know.
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