Royce Flandro, Salt Lake City, Utah: an interview by Winston P. Erickson, March 21, 2000: Saving the legacy tape no. 2 & 3

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ROYCEFLANDRO March 21, 2000 went in as a replacement. Through the years, Dad gave us two bits of advice as a former military man. He said, "Don't ever get to the position where you are a replacement because when you go in as a replacement you just come in as a single person. You are not a unit. You just come in as a single person. And they are the ones that really get killed off, and you don't have friends and so forth." So here I enter a unit going overseas as a replacement. Another thing he said was, "Don't get too close to anybody. Be good friends with everybody, but don't get real buddy-buddy because when there is a loss you really have a loss, and it affects you too much. Just be good friends with everybody. Make friends with everybody in your unit." And that's what I did. For the other one, I was a replacement. We went to Camp Adair, Oregon, to the 91 st Division, 361 st Regiment, and it was a cannon company. The anti-tank, and particularly the cannon company, were new companies added to this regiment. All of the personnel in that company had been trained as riflemen. Some of them had heavy weapons training with mortars and with machine guns. But none of them had artillery training, and yet they were issued the 105 howitzer. That is not a gun with a low trajectory. It is a howitzer with a high trajectory for getting in behind mountains and so forth. It was good as a close support weapon for infantry tactics. So it was a useful weapon ifit was really used. When I joined the unit all of the positions had been taken. They had drawn people from the other rifle companies and put them into various positions. So all of the positions had been filled. People were reading handbooks like mad trying to learn what to do. When I came they looked at me as a school boy who was wet behind the ears; not a soldier, but just coming in as a replacement. They put me in as a cannoneer and ammunition handler--those things that don't take an awful lot of thinking. It wasn't long, however, before some of the people who had special assignments pertaining to gunnery, etc., began recognizing that I had a little savvy on some of these things, even though they gave me a hard time. 17