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Interviewer:
Veteran:
Interviewer:
Veteran:
Interviewer:
them loaded up and take them to the doctor. They wouldn't just volunteer to go,
and we knew that. An officer really had the welfare of those men in your hands.
They sensed whether you cared for them or not, and if you took care of them,
they would do what had to be done. I never had a man say, "I'm not going to do
that." In Vietnam, some of those boys shot their officers in the back. I never
experienced that. We didn't treat the men that way. We were very considerate of
them, and they shared the beer, and shared the cigars or whatever we had, we
shared it with them. This is my engine change crew-this crew right here. They
could take one of these big engines off, and these engines were 3,000
horsepower, and they could pull those off. Sixteen cylinders, take another one
and put it on in a day.
How often did ya'll get a chance to bathe when you were in the jungles in New
Guinea?
At first, we could only bathe with water brought into us in what they called water
bags, and then you would get from that water bag enough water to fill your
helmet, and you actually bathed out of your combat helmet. That was your
bathtub. We had five-gallon cans, so we'd get five gallons of water and bring it
to where you lived, and then you would pour water out of that into a helmet and
wash. Then later, we finally got enough pipe and stuff and had a little plumbing
system going after about four months, or something like that, and so we began to
be able to shower then. When that happened, we could shower every day, but
this business of washing out of a helmet, that was sort of hard to do, so we didn't
get but maybe two or three baths a weeks. But we had to bathe-that was
essential.
What made you decided to become an engineer?
I just lived and breathed engines, and that really was my career out at Exxon. I
was a guy that could figure out how to make anything run or work and install it,
and so forth. So I guess I was just born with it.
Were you in favor of the war when you first started?
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