We had been, we were in doing kind
of a rear guard in a house and I was,
had been named platoon runner which
sounds good, you take messages back and
forth from the senior officer to the guys out fighting.
So I was in the, this one house where the officer
was and we could hear some of our guys firing
from a house higher up.
So the lieutenant told me,
“Go see what’s going on,
we need to know what’s happening,
what they can see!”
Because we couldn’t see any enemy.
So I went up there and they had a
real neat situation that they were across
this deep gulley was a road and
the road had been cut through a rock so
they could see the Japanese Army
moving up that road and they had to pass
through that cut either that or get up on
the bald open hill.
And they were just at a nice angle that they
could pick up a Bren gun and
fire into this cut and the ricochets would catch
these guys. So they were having a lot of fun,
every time they tried to pull up towards this cut,
one of the guys would pick up a rifle and
chase him into the cut and another guy would
pick up the Bren gun and
blast him out again which was fine for about
half an hour and then they’d turn
mortars on the house again.
So we got the heck out of there.
But to get out of this house
we had to go across a little bridge and
before that the bridge was wide open,
wasn’t very long maybe twenty or thirty feet but
it only had about eight or ten inches of parapets
on it so the only hope you had was
to hit that thing running,
but how do you run with two boxes of ammunition,
one haversack full of hand grenades,
another haversack full of rifle ammunition,
a rifle across your back,
a gas mask which we had to wear.
Anyway, I ambled across the bridge,
never got hit but when I finally,
that evening I was looking and
I wasn’t wearing a uniform,
I was wearing coveralls because
they were more comfortable in the heat
than our wool uniforms, even our cotton,
desert uniforms but I think I counted
12 or 13 machine gun or bullet holes
through the legs of my coveralls and
not one of them touched me.