Up Close Combat

House clearing was an awful thing at night time, you go into a house like that, you didn't know where you were going. And you can't watch all directions at one time, you go and clean upstairs like that you know there's somebody back behind you or what. But I remember Frank Dube again, Frank was a big fella, he was a hard rock miner from up north here anyway, Timmons. And we went up the stairway one night there and there's two Germans up there and we shot the one fella, and the other tackled Frank. And he's a big man too, I couldn't get a shot in because their rolling all over the floor and so on. And they rolled out on this balcony, and Frank ended up on top of the guy and he shoved the guy's head, and shoved the guy's head through the iron railing you know so his head was outside. Tight fit too. Then he grabbed the guy by his feet and threw him over the railing, broke his neck. (Inaudible) When you say you had to laugh he had kind of a graveyard sense of humour, Frank's just, "That's that." Then he started to cry. First time he ever had, and that goes hand in hand, you know. There's a difference when you're shooting across the street here and shooting up five feet away. Sometime along there too I beat myself to the draw. I went up into, we were clearing a house one night, and I walked up and I kicked this door open, door across the room flew open guy standing there, and I started lifting up the rifle, he started lifting his up, and I said, "This guy's gonna beat me." So I pulled the trigger anyway you know, I figure if I can scare him I maybe get another shot in, it was myself in the full length mirror across the room. So I shot myself in a mirror. It was just dark enough you couldn't see, you could just see the stupid bugger over there reaching for his rifle to shoot me and I'd be the one to do it. It scared me. It's the easiest thing in the world to kill a person, it is, but it's awful hard to live with it afterwards. Especially when you get a chance to think about it. Thank goodness I didn't for a long time. But we had another fella, we were in an attack one night and this young fella he came from Hamilton, and he opened up on a German with a rifle and shot him, emptied the clip at him, which is eleven shots, threw a hand grenade cause the guy was still kicking, he grabbed a Bren gun, emptied that into him. And the sergeant made a joke of it, he said, "What the hell is going on anyway? " Well he said, "I just killed a German." He says, "Next time you use that much ammunition we'll charge you for wasting ammunition." But he was all head up about it. Couple days later I saw him in a corner by himself thinking so I mean, it's not a nice feeling. But on the other hand if you hadn't shot him, he'd have shot you.