January 15, 1945

 JOHN MACE
 RETIRED FARMER
 BRAZIL, INDIANA
 STAFF SERGEANT, UNITED STATES ARMY, WORLD WAR II

T
hey pinned us down there in that snow all day. We were sticking up like a sore thumb out there in our ODs — olive drab, just your dark-brown uniform. We never did have no what they call camouflage gear, white outfits to put on to camouflage you with snow. A lot of the troops did, but our unit didn't.

We never did get to the woods that day. If you moved, they fired on you. Consequently, you just laid there.
      
When it was dark, we started to move back. We had one boy that was wounded pretty bad. He made it back near as far as he could, to the hedgerow. A boy by the name of Keith Williams — we always called him Willie, from Iowa — was with me, and we laid this wounded boy on an overcoat. And we were dragging him in the snow, crawling on our hands and knees, moving him behind the hedgerow to get him up to where he could get help.

When the day was over, there was eight or nine dead in my platoon, and there was, I think, seven left that didn't go to the hospital. Out of thirty-seven men. That's rough.

I had two real, real close buddies that were killed. And they weren't, I suspect, as far as thirty feet from me. We had a boy that was killed that day by the name of Jay Kimmelsman, a fine young man. He was from New York, I think, or New Jersey.

At the last company reunion that I was at, this one boy from New York was there — John was his last name — and I was talking to him. It was ten, twelve years ago, in Indianapolis. That was the first time I'd seen him since we were shipped back, split up and sent home. He was telling me he was talking to Jay's widow or his sister not too long before this reunion, and they asked if he knew anything about Jay's death, whether he suffered long or he was killed outright or what have you. And I told John, I said, "If you see her again, you tell her that he never suffered." I said, "He was close enough to me that I seen him fall. He never suffered any because he never moved a muscle."

The other buddy killed was Kent, the boy down here from Bloomington, Indiana. Just as polite and nice a fella as you could imagine. It was about a week, I suspect, before he got killed that he got a telegram from home that his wife had had a baby daughter. He was happy about it.

At that same reunion, there were three or four fellas that were in my company that had done a lot of digging and research on people. They said that they had made contact with this Kent's widow and she never did remarry. She was still a single widow, and his girl, of course, was grown up.

I've thought different times I ought to try to locate the widow, as close as she is, and talk to her. But I just don't feel up to it. He was one of the men that I could always depend on.

I guess there's a lot of it I don't want to remember. This winter, there about the twelfth of December, we had a snow come in, and it snowed up two or three days. We had a big snow all winter long. On up about the middle of January, it was starting some more. One night I told the wife to go to bed, I'd be taking a shower. And as I went back to the bathroom on the far end of the house, I looked out and I seen the snow, and a lot of memories come back. Back there in the Bulge, when my buddies was killed, we just lived in snow.

It seems like it bothered me more this winter than it ever did. I guess just because there was snow. It was long. It stayed cold.

 SANDY WALMSLEY
 RETIRED AIR-CONDITIONING AND REFRIGERATION CONTRACTOR
 NATCHITOCHES, LOUISIANA
 HOSPITAL CORPSMAN SECOND CLASS, UNITED STATES NAVY, VIETNAM

T
hey trusted you with their lives, and they took care of you, too. It was a very close bond. It was set up to be that way, and it was consummated in battle.

If there was a situation where it became your life or theirs, they would do what they had to in order to protect you. I wasn't personally witness to an example, but there are Congressional Medal of Honor winners who threw themselves on hand grenades to save corpsmen.

They'd make sure that I got my foxhole dug because I'd be too damn tired to do it. They'd make sure I got food. They'd encourage me to keep going if I was tired. They'd carry me if they had to. Big brother, little brother. You're gonna look out after your little brother, and you're gonna make sure that he gets protected. He's kept as much out of harm's way as possible. And in reciprocation — it's called "Corpsman up."

When the corpsman hears a Marine call "Corpsman up" in a bad situation, he does not have to go out there. He does not have to. They will order guns up to go forward and advance on the enemy. They will not order a hospital corpsman to do that. Ninety percent of the cases, he chose to do that.

It is not unusual to have heard stories of corpsmen actually placing their bodies in the line of fire to protect the man they were treating. Why they do it, I don't know. They just do it. Men have for ages done what afterwards was called heroic — they call it foolish if they lived to speak about it — to protect their fellow man and to come to his aid. The Marines have almost a shame if they leave any bodies on the battlefield. Why? They're not ordered to do that. There's no order anywhere that says you shall not leave, under pain of prosecution and court martial, the body of your fallen comrade on the field. Well, the North Vietnamese did that, too. They risked their lives to pull bodies out of combat situations. So it's a human trait.

There was one incident that reminds me we're not very far apart when you consider the overview of the family of man. We were coming back from one patrol. Thank God we had made no contact with the enemy, but we were worn out. We were tired. It was getting late in the afternoon. Home was in sight, and we were happy to be going in that direction.

We were walking in a downward spiral around a mountain toward our base camp. For some odd reason, somebody said, "Hey, guys, look." We had a view of the mountain opposing ours, and there on the other mountain was an enemy platoon headed in a spiral upward. They had their dark khaki uniforms on, which meant they were NVA regulars.

We were are too far apart to engage each other in small arms fire, and yet we were close enough to recognize that they were North Vietnamese and we were Marines – if we could see them, they could see us; we're all trained to be observant. And Billy Maxwell took his M-16 and held it up in the air above his head. And the guy at the lead of the NVA patrol did the same thing with his AK-47. Both of them held them there for about thirty seconds, looking at each other. And then both of them lowered their weapons, and we just went on our way.

We had mortars, and I know they always carried small mortars. We could've had a battle. Nobody knew but us, and nobody knew but them. And we never reported it. We went back home, and I'm sure they did, too. It had been a long day at the office, and we just let it be.

It was the strangest thing, and it got me thinking on a broader scale: They're people, too. And they get weary, and they get tired.