You had a lot of respect for those guys?

Yeah.  Gavin is one hell of a person, both of them really.  But Gavin, I don’t know how many times he was wounded.  Old soldier.  He’d be walking down the front lines, everybody shooting all over the goddamn place.  Seriously.  But then we left there and I believe it was E Company came along and were going to lead the pack.  We were going to go south to a town called…

You were in F Company?

Yes.  F Company 508.  So as we left the town.  And this is Beauxville at Bastille and we ran down through the country like this.  And the little town of Baupte, just like 7 or 8 miles to the south.  But right in here a big old farmhouse.  This is the farmyard.  Big old stone house, big old stone barn.  I went back there in 1974 and went in and said hello to this guy and he remembered us walking down the road.  I had seen him a couple times since then.  This was the town they called Baupte (pronounced Boot.)  Its spelled B-a-u-p-t-e, but we pronounced it Boptee.  They pronounce it Boot.  But before you get into town you make this right hand turn there was a field right in here.  And coming out of town was a creek and they had a swinging bridge cross over that night.  And we’re in this field and we’re all covered with hedgerows.  And a grenade landed right here and there was a 8 or 9 of us standing in that area.  I got hit in the face.  We all, Hector got killed, got hit in the temple.  I can’t remember the name now, can’t remember the guy’s names.  It’s almost like a blur.

It’s been 50 years.

I know.  Anyways, one of the corporals was from Chicago.  His name was Bill Lyndon I believe.  Decided to cross that swinging bridge, and they had it booby-trapped.  And it really blew the thing away.  Finally got him out of there, got him back on the jeep, the medical jeep.

He’s still alive?

Still alive.  Send him back to the beach.  Never heard anymore, no one knew what happened to him from that point on.  But anyway there was a German motor pool down here, just on the outside of town.  After that happened Colonel Shanley ordered us to go in and take that motor pool.  Well, as we were going down through there we never got to the motor pool.  I don’t remember who in the hell it was that took the motor pool.  They captured several vehicles, but as they came out there were vehicles coming out of the motor pool, coming down the highway.  There were like banks on both sides, you know the road, there was a very narrow road, get up on the banks you can jump right down on the tank.  And one of my guys jumped down and opened the lid and dropped a gamma grenade down inside the tank, closed the lid and took off.  Now Gammon grenades are very sensitive.  They are made, like a, have you ever seen one?  Well you screw the top of and you got a pin that goes through there and you take the tape and wind it around and you got a piece of lead at the end of it.  Very easy to come out of there.

Cloth bag?

Yes, an elastic bag.  And you can put whatever amount you want in that bag.  For example if you wanted to put a piece of C2 in there this big.  It would stretch to fit that.  But he dropped a gamma grenade in there and took off and he almost didn’t get out of the tank in time.  We knocked out two tanks on that walkway, or that driveway.  I believe it was E Company, I think E Company took the motor pool by itself.  I don’t remember how many vehicles they got, my memories not as good as it used to be.  So we went on down into town from there after we cleared that out, we went on down into town and there sits an American 37mm, set right at the edge of the square, right in the middle of town.  And right down the road about 100 yards away comes a German Tiger tank.  I said, “You better take that son of a bitch and stick it in your ear pal, because it ain’t going to work.”  Anyway we called for a bombardment, and the artillery got the tank.  Fortunately.  Anyway we ended up taking Baupte and we finally met the 101, made contact with the 101 later in the afternoon that day.  So that was somewhere around the 13^th or the 14^th of June I believe.  So we spent the next couple of days there.  We got a little rest because they moved one of the Companies in front of us to get a little relief.  We almost went into reserve.  So we were in reserve, we were just sitting there, relaxing a little bit and we had some pritters and a whole tar milk.  And this one guy could speak English as good as you or I.  Raised here in the United States, knew all the ball teams, knew anything you want to know about baseball or football or whatever it happened to be.  I sat there and talked to him for quite a while.  I said, “What did you go back to Germany for?”  He said, “Well, my family is German, I might as well be on their side.”  That’s his choice, whatever.  Then we went through Baupte and went back to went a couple more of those little skirmishes.  And most of this was not in towns, a lot of this was in the countryside.  I couldn’t tell you the name of the road, no one could basically.

This was 5, 6 days after you landed.

No, no this would have been… Baupte came on the 12^th, which is 6 days after.  We had a day of rest on the 13^th or the 14^th, and then we moved out towards Eitenville.  We run across a couple skirmishes on our way to Eitenville.  We spent a few days in Eitenville. 

Are you still pretty much isolated from the rest of the troops?

Oh, yeah.

You’re behind German lines.

Yeah, we’re still behind German lines.  Now a couple of the outfits crossed the lines, they got to the river, took them 1 day to get to the river, 5 days to get across the Merderet River.  That’s the way it worked.  So around the 18^th or 19^th, I can’t remember the name of the town now.  Any time you run across a building you have to search the building.  Clean the building out.  This happened quite often, this got to be a routine actually.

That’s pretty dangerous fighting now.

Yeah.  We can handle that though.  In fact one of my guys, this was maybe…after we left the Baupte, went towards Eitenville, he came up missing.  Couldn’t find him, thought the Germans got him.  It was 3 days later we found him in a basement in a French home, drinking wine with some gal.  And he’d be court-martialed sure as hell.  We covered up for him.  He was drunk, couldn’t find his way, couldn’t find his hat.  We had to find his hat.  Anyway, we took care of him.  But from there on we got down to Hill 131.  That’s where I came out, just before Hill 131.  We got a mortar landed near us, threw me against a hedgerow.  And I hit the other knee, my right knee, hurt my back, they almost had to drag me getting out of there.  Put me on a stretcher because I was hurting bad.  I came on back to Utah beach and we were sitting on a jeep, waiting on jeep, and they took us back to the hospital area, and that’s when I got there, someone stole my boots.  We spent the night there and that night he stole my boots.

And how did it feel?  How important were those boots to a paratrooper.