Bill Pastore, Salt Lake City, Utah: an interview by Jason Hardy, September 20th, 2006: part of the Saving the legacy project

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br ak up in chunk like your thumbnail. Boy when you're hit with ur you an ki y ur butt goodbye because you're gone. But theirs, hell, you dig in at night and you'll find little spots of blood all over y u where you've been hit with - you just weren't hit in a vital place or not enough of them. But then, after that was over then, then, they wounded quite a few. Then it just went down to regular firefight and we lost all of our people. There were just thirteen of us left and I was already wounded. I got wounded and I wouldn't withdraw; I wouldn't go back. I wasn't hurt, I was just hit in the little scar here on my shoulder. And besides that, by that time I was the platoon sergeant. Everybody was dead and there was no way to get them down. Our corpsman used up all of his battle dressings. Our radioman got knocked off the hill. The first barrage, they knocked him off of this ridge we were on and down into a gully and destroyed the radio. And a sergeant, and extra sergeant - he had just joined us - Summers? I can't quite - it don't matter what his name was. He was going to go down and see if the radio was alright. He just stood up and, boy, he got it. Took him out. So our corpsman was ... I told the corpsman to stay in these rocks - there were some rocks, oh, just twenty feet below us. I said, "We'll bring the wounded down to you." Because there's no sense in him going up there and getting hit, too. Stay down there where he can do some good. But we didn't have radio contact; we were up there all alone. 76