Harold S. Madsen, Pleasant Grove, Utah: an interview by Benjamin Bahlmann, September 6, 2002: Saving the Legacy tape nos. 530-532

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HAROLD . MAD EN PT MB R6 2002 but if you're smart enough you can kind of figure out, okay this is a campaign and w r moving forward. Now we have reached a certain point but they've got to have their flanks pull up maybe a mile away, totally out of sight of vision and they've got to get some into position. So we're just sitting here waiting, waiting, two or three hours after we'd been hurrying, very rapidly, at a rapid pace to get to a point. So we knew nothing. BB: So at that point, of course, you couldn't tell that you're waiting just because someone's protecting your flanks or you've just protected someone else's or whatever. HSM: Right. So we didn't know why; we just knew that in the grand scheme of things it had to be that way. BB: You mentioned the one man who took on this house seemingly alone. Had you seen other people do things that you would count as ... that might have been crazy, but kind of heroic, if I can use that term? I don't know .. . HSM: Yes. I have reflected on heroism and I thought that it's sometimes, first of all I thought as I reflected on my experience in the combat I thought first of all there are very few, very few that I would call heroes. Very few. I would say occasionally there's a guy that just goes nuts like that guy whose wife joined the WA Cs. What he did would be called heroic, but if you really knew, I mean, he couldn't care whether he lived or died, he was so furious with his wife. I thought, could you call it heroism? I'd say I wouldn't call it heroism. I'd call it something else. Okay, this other guy that killed the prisoner, that would go out at night, is he a hero? I thought, well, if it were all written up, he would probably be a hero because he killed a lot of other people. But he didn't have to do it in the line of duty. I mean, he went 69