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Interviewer:
Veteran:
Interviewer:
Veteran:
got hot, put it back in your duffle bag, and you'd put that cereal patty in that cup
of hot water. It had milk, sugar, and everything in it. When you put it in there, it
would swell up, and it would make a whole cup full.
It tasted pretty good?
And it tasted good. It was sweet, had the milk in it, and it was just like you'd
make it now. We had gone back and set up, and we had been up there a good
while, and they started giving us some R&R to go into Manila. I was sergeant at
the time, and I had about eight to ten men with me, and they sent us to Manila.
They had set up some little tents up there or what not, and we were on vacation,
but while we were there, the war ended. It ended the day we went up there,
because they dropped the bomb up there on Hiroshima in Japan.
Was that an atomic bomb?
Yes, that's what ended the war. We were already scheduled to go to Manila on
our R&R, and we were up there the day the Japs came out to Yokohama to sign a
peace treaty. That day, we were already up there at this camp, and the town went
wild up there shooting guns and having a good time because it was over. I told
my men, "Let's stay here. If we go down there, we'll get killed, so we'd better
stay here." The next morning, we cut our day short and I brought them back to
camp. I called for a sixty-six to come and get us, because the guys were crazy up
there. They were drinking all that old stuff, and you could have easily gotten
killed. It would have been terrible to have gone through the war and get killed on
our R&R. But anyway, we went on back and were shipped out from down at
White Beach, and went out to the ship on LCIs-that's the Landing Craft
Infantry, where you'd run up on the beach and the front end would open up, and
you'd come out with your guns, you know, to make the beachhead. We had to go
out there and get on a ship on those LCIs, because there was no harbor there. We
loaded up and went on to occupy Japan, we circled through where we were
supposed to land just to see, and it was a rugged place to have to land to make the
beachhead. Wasn't no beach to it. We were gonna have to go up a high wall,
like a cliff. You know you have to outsmart 'em. They figured you'd go through
the easy place, but we were gonna go through the hard place, because they
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