Living conditions on the hill.

We had two men to a bunker. A bunker means from your trench, at least my bunker, you walked up one step which was probably about 11 or 12 inches high, and then you walked down four into the bunker where two of us could sleep. In between us, I had my Bren machine gun pointing at this door, which was a blanket. If you could scrounge better, it would’ve been tarp or something, put one of them in there. This was a plain grey blanket. So, we keep that on the door because we had a password every night. We went by password. Sometimes a password would be ‘Deep Well’, I remember that one. ‘Rosie’, ‘Jeannie’, we used women’s names mainly and that password didn’t work, you know, friend or foe, it didn’t - that’s it! That’s the password.Interviewer: So at this stage, in the Korean War, the lines had become static, the men had dug in on either side of ‘No Man’s Land’? Yeah, they were dug in way better than we were. They were …would you believe they had 20 foot bunkers? We were somewheres within a mile and a half - a mile to a mile and a half - in various places across from us. We could aim the sight of the machine gun but no use of using it. We didn’t, but sometimes we did. We felt so free sometimes that we thought “everything’s fine”. We had rules; no walking on the hill, only in the trench, you know. The trench led into a bunker, from a bunker into another trench into another bunker and that’s the way it was there. Everybody had a little bit of work to do, had a little bit of work to do everyday - fill up sandbags and bag your trench, put a cap on it. We had a candle, candles for a light if we had to, but we didn’t use them. We had two big chocolates. They were a meal within itself for a week, in case it got hot on top, you know.Interviewer: In other words, if it became … if the people bringing food up could no longer bring food up to you because of enemy action, you were to eat this chocolate? That’s right, yeah.