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 out and sought after it. But I thought he was like a natural born killer h wa a killer. H wasn't normal. Okay. Then I thought, there's my squad leader who's aiming this boat right at the shore and he sees machine gun coming from there. I say to myself, well that was sort of heroic in a way because the natural instinct would ... BB: You would have done differently maybe? HSM: ... would be to avoid certain death (laughs). So he knew that that was our objective and he was doing it. I'd say to myself there's a bit of heroism in that. So I would ask myself, what are heroes? I would say to myself, maybe under unusual circumstances, in order to maybe preserve a certain situation somebody risks his life for the benefit of a larger number that would probably be heroic. But I thought that doesn't happen very much in war because maybe people, I think those who haven't been in combat don't realize that it's such a unified thing, it's such a team thing. So you don't see heroes on the basketball floor or on the football floor, they're doing it together, they're working together. So it seemed to me that that was the way war was playing out. BB: With your explanation, then, did you see other people do things on their own more, outside of the team realm for whatever reason, crazy or not? Is there any other examples of someone rushing a pillbox or anything like that? HSM: We would hear occasionally, you know, it was McAuliffe that was the ... BB: Bastogne? HSM: The Bastogne thing, I think so. Of course that took probably a little of courage in his disadvantaged position to do that. So we would occasionally hear something, not something quite that dramatic ... 70