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Show want d the next one to go. He knew he was going to g t hit. H wa tanding right where everybody else had been hit. He knew he was going to g t it. He t ld th m, kay, fire for effect. He no more than said it, and psst you could hear the mortar h 11 coming over (cause you can hear them come over, and you can see them just before they hit the ground), and then you would hear the rifle shot and down he went. The shell mortars hit, and that was last we heard of the sniper. But he was gone, too. He was an old China marine. So I tell you, he would rather die than desert one of my people. That's the way Hawk Morrison, Spangaletti, Nolan- that's all the way the China marines were. That's what they were bred to do. Welker's father was a senator or something in Idaho, and here he was a China marine. He went home. He got out alive. Welker had been overseas long enough, and they sent him home, and they sent RC Smith home because they'd had two years overseas, and some of them only had maybe twentyone months. So you stayed for twenty-four or you get carried home in a bag; or you lose an arm or a leg, or blind or something, or you're wounded. If you get a broken bone, you go home, because they won't heal in the Pacific. They wouldn't heal. Don't ask me why. They just didn't heal. You get a broken bone, you broke your arm or your leg, why, you got out. So what do I get? It goes between the two damn bones. [Laughing] We had some replacements just join us, and there was a foxhole right by the side of the trail in coral about that deep. New replacement; just fresh from overseas come diddly-bobbing along the trail, missed his footing, fell in and broke his leg. He went home. I thought, boy. We were going somewhere else, and we were up on this hill, and I caught my foot on a root. I must have fallen fifty feet, just tumbled end over end; and I 110 |
