Just a Soldier Like Me

We took over a marine hospital outside of Old, the city of Oldenburg, and we were having it all cleaned out. It was three storey buildings. They were made like army buildings and they were joined by a “H” area in between two of the buildings. Gorgeous things, all brick, everything modern windows, all crank out windows or crank down windows and everything. Beautiful place. And our job was to go out and pick up a bunch of German prisoners and bring them back and they worked as work crews and I had one fellow with me he was, he had a terrible battle wound in his leg. And he was an older man so I put the rest of them on the job but just cleaning out rooms, taking all the furniture out and putting our furniture in, stuff like that and I more or less kept him away from the rest of them. And we sat down one day at dinnertime, out in the field, out in the grass, it was nice weather then, it was what, June, July, end of June, July, weather was good. So I start asking about the War. And it was amazing, he was an awful lot of places I was on the opposite side. So we just talked as normal people and I liked him right away as soon as I started talking. So he was telling me what hell it was for them. Our planes just drove them insane. When they seen our spitfires and typhoons coming, they were terrified to death. And then when they’d see five and six and seven hundred bombers coming at one time he said it was horrible, really, really horrible. But he was badly wounded in Normandy. And the impression I got was, shit, he’s just another soldier like I was. He went into the service to do what he thought was right. He wasn’t SS or anything like that. He was just another soldier that went in. You know, we were so much alike, how do you hate a person like that?