Mark L. Abbott, American Fork, Utah: an interview by Benjamin Bahlmann, April 5, 2001: Saving the Legacy tape nos. 383 - 385

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MARK L. ABBOTT PRIL 2001 MLA: No in fact, we kept. .. finally we saw one guy h was probably th afi ty man. Pretty soon he took off down through .. .it was real quiet in there in the coconut palm . It must have been kind of a farm because they were evenly spaced. It was just kind of beautiful in a way. But I remember one man finally raising up and, boy, he was a high­tailing it out of there. But he was down quite a ways. He must have been their safety man, you know, to get away in case something happened. Something did. I think we got them all, but I'm not sure about it. BB: I read about that. MLA: He did. That was kind of out of the Arabian Knights. He did. Those sabers. Of course, that was quite a thing for people to pick up, too, for souvenirs, those sabers. Some of them was pretty well adorned. BB: What did you think of Japanese opposition, like that kind of tactic? Was that just kind of strange to you? Or was that brave to you? MLA: Killing their selves, that was different. That's all different. But that's the way they did. It worked to their detriment quite a lot because, well, when they was hopeless, why then they'd just shoot themselves. I remember there on Tarawa, I think it was one of the pillboxes or command post or something, they were just lined up there in a line and you see this quite regular, maybe not quite as many, but they was all dead. They was just setting up, most of them, and they'd had a split toe, split sneaker. Some of them had their shoes off, others just had their toe in the trigger and they shot themselves. But it was kind of a nice thing in a way for us (laughs). But it was quite a thing for them, I guess. 66