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Show HAROLD . MAD EN PT B R 6, 2002 HSM: I remember in the woods-this is late-I thought the odds are against m . I remembered people on D-Day but, I thought they were killed. And I thought to myself there's too many odds against this. I'm not going to make it without at least getting badly injured. It was just like Russian roulette, you keep doing that enough times and you re going to get the bullet. I thought of Russian roulette. I thought, this happens enough times and it's got to happen, got to happen. I thought that I would either get killed or injured. BB: Was that a confining thought or a liberating thought when you finally reached that conclusion that something' s going to happen to me. HSM: It was just kind of a maturing thought. It just said to me you needn't fret about it, you needn't worry about it, you needn't even pray about preservation. You can pray for your family at home, you can pray for the prophet, you can pray for sensible things, but don't pray to necessarily live. The prophet Joseph wasn't worthy to live, I mean, if he wasn't needed to live and I'd read in the Book of Mormon the thousand that were converted, they were killed, and the prophet said, "They went to heaven." No big deal. So I realized in the Lord's mind that death wasn't the worse thing that could happen. So it was a comfort, I think, in a way. Sorry to spend so much time on that. BB: No, those are the experiences that are very good. HSM: We were all beautiful at complaining. We just loved to complain about this weather. And when we went back, we call it a pull-back. We'd be out there for ten days or whatever, then they'd pull us back and said somebody else could go forward, and so forth. So we'd pull back and we'd see some farmhouses and say, "Oh, man, look at that farmhouse." Well, the officers were there and there were some sheep pens and pig pens and so forth and they threw down some straw and it was winter, it was very cold, and so 57 |
