Minefields

Heroes Remember

Minefields

Transcript

One day as we were travelling along I noticed we were travelling off the highway and I noticed little round rings in front of me and I immediately knew what that was. That there's teller mines planted there. So I hollered to stop and the tank stopped and I looked and they were all around and we were lucky not to have blown a track to get there. So I ordered my second driver out to have a look and see where we were and I thought that maybe if he could direct the tank back exactly in the track that we came in on we'd have no problem. So Dusty come out and was directing back and all of a sudden we ran over a teller mine. It went off. Blew the track, my super was very close to us. He was blown back riddled with stones. I climbed out to have a, a look at him and he was lying there. I said "You know he's dead." I went and I got the, the morphine. We have morphine syringes in the, in the tank for, to use when some person's badly burnt or something like that and I gave him to them. He had an eye sort of hanging out and there's blood all down his face was full of holes and just as I, he was saying, "Am I hurt bad boss am I hurt bad?" I said, "No no Dusty, you know, you're alright, you're in the pink. We'll take ya back and be alright." And I thought well I wonder you know 3 minutes it's all that he can last here and at that time I saw an ambulance going along the road above us. So I stopped it and we got Dusty and put him in the ambulance and went back to the, to the hospital, and I went in with him. And ah, the doctors operated. Oh on the way back, way down to the hospital he was saying, "Boss I could really use a cigarette I could really use...". I said "Okay". So I gave him a cigarette and he couldn't suck in because the air was coming in his cheeks and he couldn't get a drag and I held his cheeks like this, blocking the holes in his face that he could get a drag on the cigarette. Got back to the hospital, he went right into surgery. I had no means to getting back to the unit and so they let me stay and sleep on the stretcher there over night. Ah in the morning they told me that they thought that Dusty would live.

Description

Mr. Murray speaks of the attempt to retreat from a mine field, and the tragic events that followed.

Robert Murray

Robert Murray was born in Toronto, Ontario on February 8, 1918. His father was Inspector of Detectives of the Toronto police force. Mr. Murray had six brothers and sisters. He was the second youngest.

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