UNKNOWN SOLDIERS: Reliving WWII in Europe

We was supposed to go out and get a prisoner that night, and this combat MP come up there and was gonna take him back. When they bombed us he was knocked down but wasn’t hurt much. He come to and was lookin’ around, and all them other guys was dead except I started to groan. He threw me over his shoulder with them ten broken ribs and made a run for a British jeep that was back in the woods. They threw me in the back, and he jumped in and they took off for their aid station.

They gave me a big heavy shot o’ morphine and took me back to the field hospital. Two British doctors put me under a fluoroscope, and I was so full o’ morphine I couldn’t talk but could hear them, and they looked at each other and looked at me and at each other and said “This man should not be here. He’s not even supposed to be alive according to his picture. He should be dead.” Blood was running outta my mouth.

Three days later at the General Hospital at Naples the blood was all clotted. They couldn’t get it out with a needle so I had to cough it up. That was about thirty days of misery. Every time I’d cough the blood them ribs would grind together. They just give me morphine every three hours for sixty days, said there’s nothing we can do for that man except see what nature does. No penicillin, just morphine ’cause I didn’t have any open wounds; it didn’t break the skin where it caved those ribs in. Along toward the last they’d come with that morphine needle, and I’d get sick at my stomach ’cause it was building up in me. I had an aversion to it. When the ribs finally got to knitting, and I got up, this shoulder was hanging clear down to here, but that came back up. The three ribs was all healed on top of each other, and the shoulder muscles was all messed up. That’s why they wouldn’t let me go back to combat.

These six chaplains would come to my deathbed at various times tryin’ to git me to join their church, and I says I won’t be a hypocrite because I don’t believe in everything you got in your different religions. I believe in the Creator and Jesus Christ and his true teachings but not in the doctrines the way they interpret them. My parents never enforced any church on me so I tried ’em all and compared what the ministers had to say.

When this here bomb hit it knocked me out so quick that I didn’t feel anything, but when I came to I seen a big flash of light in my mind, and then all that pain hit me. That light in my mind has had one terrific bearing on me ever since, ’cause I know there’s more in this world than we know about, and that there light always will be in my mind. I can use it any time. My channels has been opened to the metaphysical part of my mind from that day. That’s how I got over my alcoholism. I used an analyzing research in my own mind.

Well, what the hell. We always did say it would take a bomb to bring down our Big Mo. Instead, it opened him up.

You were so barely ahead of the rampaging dragon that in an instant a flame could flick you to a crisp. In an OP house, you or whoever put you there was asking for it, and we were blown out of our share. It could strike anywhere. The bastards were all over us. Observation had suddenly ceased to be a spectator sport. To see was to feel. An OP or CP behind the line one minute could be on the front the next. Short of joining the fray with rifle and grenade,