Paul why don't we talk about the first night you got introduced or the first day the night
and then the following day that you got introduced into combat into the line at a place I guess
is pronounced sandee fro Americans it's spelled saint die and that's what the troops called
it yeah yeah uh tell what you found the next day when you woke up tell what you found and
what your reactions were uh I woke up and I'd gone to sleep in a field in this uh mountain
setting big trees everywhere and I looked around and I saw a lot of bodies of soldiers
they were German soldiers maybe there were fifteen or twenty and they were young soldiers
as young as my people were and they were still clutching their rifles or their machine pistols
and their skin was white and their eyes were open and so forth as I said I think in a book
of mine I'd never seen dead bodies before except my grandmother's at the funeral home
you know you op you have a viewing and so on and that was fine but uh they were older
people it woke me up to what this war is about this war is about killing people killing young
people most of them who haven't done anything I mean it's just based upon utterly unfair
premises about human behavior and I began to catch on yeah yeah at that point but that
didn't change me I still enjoyed knocking off groups of German soldiers yeah yeah uh
you know you talk in that particular episode as I said I think earlier the last show a
lot of it is minimalist but powerful talk about two German soldiers that looked like
they were fourteen with their brains oozing out one through a hole in his head and one
through his nose that's right and that was the that was the about three hours after I
had awakened that morning and these were younger kids than I'd seen spread out on the field
yeah the ones on the field were probably about uh fifteen sixteen years old these kids were
about eight years old yeah bizarre yeah yeah I began to realize you know this is going
to be a crusade people who would send kids that young have to be punished yeah yeah uh
you also learned you said uh to compress your lips so as not to you know hold in the emotion
yeah yeah understandable yeah you had to do something because looking at those kids dead
with their brains coming out of holes in their head and so on if you were in a normal circumstance
you'd burst into tears yeah yeah but because you're leading a tough military unit that
is unthinkable yeah you can't do that so you've got to have a mechanism to conceal any kind
of sentiment yeah and this is what General Patton did he the habit of talking obscenely
and profanely all the time largely because he was so sensitive to the damage that he
uh witnessed he had had to cause and there's a fairly common technique you still do that
no no I do I never see so awful sights anymore yeah yeah Patton you're working on a book
on Patton now yeah ok give you a plug as to what's coming out in two thousand two thousand
and seven I understand It'll be available in two thousand and seven I should live so
long I hope you do uh in the one minute we have left before we uh go to break Paul tell
about uh sergeant Engel and you know the impact on you when you watched him get hit sergeant
Engel yes this was an attack by the whole battalion that is four companies of it at
one time on uh let's see it's March fifteenth the Ides of March nineteen forty five the
war was almost over we were attacking this woods and we were met by a fuselage of small
arms fire the minute we got inside the edge of the woods and we were all lying down on
our stomachs hoping to make ourselves so small that we wouldn't be hit by any sort of wayward
fire and my head was down on top of some leaves I think and I could see horizontally a sergeant
of my platoon who decided that he would he'd had enough of that so he stood up and he's
trying to locate the machine gun and he was hit by it in the face and he before he even
fell down he spit out a mouth full of teeth and blood and so on and fell on the floor
I was in tough with him uh much later and it was clear what had happened to him he had
gone through years of facial rebuilding to make him look like a person again after which
he decided to become an Episcopal minister which he did with great success in the I learned
about his his success as a minister which probably wouldn't have taken place if he hadn't
been badly hurt but that that was a sad episode that was the same day that I got hit in the
same place I was hit by a shells from a tank uh an eighty eight millimeter uh weapon yeah
they shot the trees above me and sent the fragments downward yeah and that's when my
platoon sergeant was killed right next to me right This excerpt is brought to you by
the Massachusetts School of Law