Armored division

All the main highways were all mined. We had to find cow trails around that you could get in and whether you needed a bulldozer to widen it here and there and so forth so they could come up with trucks and so on. That was our job to find a way in because the highway, there’s lots of main highways, lots of room on them but all kinds of mines under them and that was the thing - to find a way in. We were traveling goat paths most of the time. Once you got onto it you could feel the hard pack road, they had to dig a hole in to put that mine in and they’d cover it over. If you have a sharp eye you start to see that, provided it was daylight. When you were doing that at dusk, that’s tricky. I remember one time, I don’t know we were going down this strange trail, and all of a sudden I saw where the dirt had been moved and I hollered to stop and we stopped there. We had missed a mine by that far. We backed out of there and taped it and called in to headquarters, there’s mines on this road so in a lot of cases we picked them up if we had orders to pick them up but otherwise they’d send up engineers to take them up and we got set back with our heavy machine guns and so on to try and protect them out there. And a lot of times they would bring those tanks up with the flails on and they’d run through it. Once they run through it there was a path the width of that, I think that was about a twelve foot flail on the front of it with these great big chains going around. They were stuck out in front of the tank so it didn’t hurt, these big chains flying around but it didn’t hurt the vehicle that way.