Description
Mr. Mercer shares his feelings towards the relationships of his fellow comrades; a unique bond where they felt like one.
Leslie Mercer
Mr. Leslie Mercer was born June 24, 1927 in St. John’s, Newfoundland. Being a child of the Great Depression, he went to work at the dockyard at a very young age. He was too young to volunteer for the Second World War but when the Korean War broke out he was quick to join with the Special Force. He became part of the Royal Canadian Horse Artillery as a bombardier. After spending a year in Korea, Mr. Mercer returned to St. John’s, Newfoundland, married and raised a family.
Transcript
You have a bond of friendship that just naturally comes that when you’re that close together, it’s just something that comes out of you, you can’t explain why because you’re depending on him and he’s depending on you. I mean if he’s loading a gun and he’s firing it and I’m giving the orders, we got to listen, there’s no back talking or anything like that, you know, we know we got to do it and we’re there to do it and you just click together as one. And where you live together and you go get a shave or something like that; don’t throw that water away, I’ll use the same water. You mold into a, not six men on a gun, actually there’s only one. You mold together like that yah. And whatever you’ve got, you shared. You got a little extra sometime, you got something from home. There was lots of Hershey chocolate bars over there, the Americans, the Hershey bars come with the American rations, we were all on American rations. Plenty of cigarettes and stuff like that. You never had much, shall we say, bartering from each other because everybody had the same rations, shall we say. And when I got out of my little bunk I had made well the other fellow was waiting to get in it, you know what I mean.