Mistaken identity

POWs all had blue denim uniforms, you know, jackets and there was a great big red circle on the back of their jacket. What I used to wear in the fall, when it was chilly, I used to wear a red and black checked wind breaker. When I was going up on the mountains, I had to take some readings, some weather readings and a few moisture readings up one of these valleys and I was up there one afternoon, I heard a “ping, ping, ping” going down in the camp down below and I supposed that the, probably the guards were having a little musketry practice. But the next thing I knew a couple of bullets whizzed past my ear pretty quickly so I high-tailed it down the hill pretty fast. I found out I guess these old World War One Veterans their eyesight probably wasn’t as acute as it had been and they thought that they had seen one of these red marks of the prisoners uniform up there and that was what they were shooting at so I escaped with my life. That was my first exposure to, not enemy fire I guess but military fire anyway.