When we got to France, they sent me to automobile school. I learned to drive trucks, a tank and the Studebakers the officers got driven around in. I did pretty well in training and got a 98 on my test, but they gave the tank job to someone else. I got transferred to the medical corps after an ambulance driver got killed. They figured I’d fit in, since my dad was a doctor.
I saw some awful things in the medical corps. One time they brought over this German boy. He couldn’t have been more than 15 or 16. He had some chest wounds and looked pretty bad. He saw me smoking a cigarette and asked if he could have one. So I rolled him one; we didn’t have ready-made cigarettes in those days. I lit it for him and put it in his mouth and left to do my rounds. When I came back the cigarette was still in his lips, but he’d died. There was another time I found one dead German sitting in a dugout, and his legs were blown off from under him. He still had a pack on his back, and I opened it up and I saw three different pictures of what I guess was his family. I sent them back to Germany, but I don’t know who got them.
I lost some of my hearing in the war. I was walking along a road near the Argonne Forest when a couple of 155mm guns went off near me. Boy, was it loud. I swear I can still hear the ringing in my ears. But I didn’t tell the Army. If I did, they would have sent me out. So I stuck it out.
I didn’t talk about the war too much when I got home–it was just a job. My grandfather was in the Civil War, and I’d asked him about that and he didn’t say much. I asked if he’d shot a man, and he said he’d shot one out of a tree. But he never liked talking about it, and when I got back I understood why.
