After he was shot

And we had a bunch of wounded there, but I guess because I was, well I was shot through the chest so, so they loaded me up and I went out to a, I was conscious all the time. The first, well they'd run out of morphine and all the rest of it so, I was, I was conscious and I was on that thing and I remember getting to the, to the field dressing station on a stretcher. And one of the things ah, well, I was, I was laying on my side trying to pull this guy in and, and the bullet went in on my back very low down about my belt and came out right under my ah breast right there and ah one of the things I always told ya in a, in a stomach it pierced my stomach too, that you would be terribly thirsty. And that was one of the things I remember is, that terrible thirst. Oh God it was just...

I was on a stretcher. It was just on one of those canvas stretchers with no clothes on between two woolen blankets for almost three weeks. Ah, I was at this field dressing station and they, they did something. I don't know, I don't know what the sequence of events other than I've seen some of the documentation on it, but ah they patched me up somehow or other there and got you know sewed me up and all the rest of it. And there were no nurses there, it was like a MASH unit without nurses and so on. There were orderlies and the doctors I guess and so on, but I was on that stretcher from the eighth of March until about the twenty-third of March being moved around in various places and, and I wasn't they sent the wounded then back to England. Unless you were, you weren't badly wounded then they didn't send them back to England, but if there, most of the wounded went back to England. Well, I didn't get sent back to England because they didn't think I was gonna survive. I think that's the reason, I don't know that for sure, but I was unconscious most of the time. I had times I wasn't and one of the things you knew, you instinctively knew in there, that there was one area that they, they put the dying in. Ones they couldn't do anything for and so they put them in, and I was in that section for awhile. I, I remember that and I wouldn't, I wouldn't die and they had to take me back out. And finally I, we, we were loaded on a DC3 and sent back to England. And that was the first time that ah, well I went to a hospital and there was white sheets and nurses and all the rest of it and they ah... And I was dirty, Christ we had been fighting for a week or more, I was dirty, I was covered with blood, or you know dried blood and all the rest of them were just taking me off the stretcher and I said to the nurses God don't put me on that clean sheets you know. Clean me up a little bit first. And they were just saying no, no now we'll put you in there, we'll clean ya up, we got lots of sheets.