I tell you, it's, you're in the woods in the wintertime, days are short, and it's blacker
than the inside of a wolf. Can't see a damn thing, and all you hear is, "Hey, we're moving
out," and so basically you hang onto the guy in front of you, you can't see.
So literally you're, you're holding onto the person in front of you.
Oh, yeah. Yeah, other, it's like putting a bucket over your head. You can't see anything,
there's just absolutely nothing. You walk along, you stumble, you bump into the guy
in front of you, the guy behind you bumps into you, but you're moving and it's pitch
dark, and light doesn't come for a few hours. Gradually, I, and the engineers had corduroyed
the road, logs across it for some distance, and then it just got muddy. Along, along about
daylight -- and daylight probably didn't come 'til seven o'clock -- we hear a firefight
going on ahead of us. And, and we, we move up, move up, and finally the whole column
stops. And so when the column stops like that, you dig in. We were, we were on a trail along
the ridge, and you dig in and you, just a little slit trench or something, but just
gets you off the ground. The fire, firefight gets intense, intense, intense, usually the
thing, the firefight ends and you move up a little bit more, geez, we didn't move at
all. This firefight kept going and going. And the next morning, we were, I'm still in
there. I think, I think I'm still in the same trench, or somewhere another ten yards up,
and we're stuck there; the platoon is stuck there.
Finally that, finally after the fourth day, fifth day, we started to move and move and
move. And the general isn't up there, and the colonel is pushing us up, and this terrible
firefight is taking place. And the, finally we, the path goes this way and then we curve
up to, to hit, finally, the German strongpoint. And just, artillery coming in, and rifle fire,
small arms fire, and God, as I started up that slope, I see this kid I was friends with,
with a bullet in his head. Jesus, I don't know... finally, we were all moving up, the
colonel, we'd been ordered to move, and so we're moving, and the firefight is going on.
And a shell hits the tree above me and I get knocked down, and Jesus... I said, "God, I'm
hit." And one of the guys comes over to me and says, "Are you," pulls the sweater up,
and there's a big piece of shrapnel in my side, and I'm, I'm not bleeding a hell of
a lot, but I'm bleeding. And the medic patches it up, puts something on it, that's it, so
we keep going. But as we cleared... the ridge is like this, and the ridgeline drops over
here, and the main, main attack is up this side of the ridge, and there's Colonel Purcell,
big as, big as God, six-feet-six, standing there and waving us on: "Come on, you guys,
let's go, let's go." And I'm sure that that finally just did it. Everybody just moved,
and suddenly in combat, you know the battle is over when the firearms stop, and it just
quit, it just, whump, and it was quiet. And all you heard, all you heard then was artillery
fire off in the distance, and, "My God, it's done." I don't know, there was just hardly anybody left.