A Loss of One Hundred Men

And when we hit the beaches in Normandy that morning, we lost a hundred men right off the bat, first morning, 5:30 in the morning, 6 o’clock in the morning when we hit the beaches. We lost a hundred men. So I was going in and I saw a friend laying there dead, another fellow wounded hollering for help. You couldn’t touch him, you couldn’t stop, you had to keep going. There were other people coming along looking after those people. But when you lose a hundred people, almost brothers, they are closer than brothers, for all those years, and it kind of affects you the first morning and then the next day and on, days and days would go, you’d say, “What about Jim? ” “Oh, he was killed last night.” It doesn’t affect you any, you’re so used to hearing that so and so had been killed, so and so had been wounded bad and it just, you know, it doesn’t bother you any. But it bothers you at first. But some people it did bother them a lot. Some people it did bother them. Some of us you get used to it.