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get us, no matter where or when.
    Later, when we were able to reach the radioman, we found he had stuffed his pockets, his shirt, and even hisoversized leggings with boxes of K rations. He had lost his life over a box of barely palatable survival food.
    Now we had three men definitely killed, and each was unnecessary—the man who stood up in the open and fired at an armored half-track, the one buried by our tank, and the chowhound.
    Sergeant Williams also was wounded in this action, but he was a very unusual case. A mortar shell had exploded near him, and even though the medic could not find a scratch on him, he was paralyzed from the neck down. He could move nothing but his eyes.
    This same Sergeant Williams had taken a bullet through the neck around D day and returned to the front in six weeks. He had a very heavy, bull-like neck, but, it seemed to me, he had returned too quickly after such a severe wound. He was an exceedingly stubborn individual, for he recovered from his second injury and returned to action in September. Then he was too close to a German grenade and was paralyzed a second time. After his subsequent recovery, he again applied for frontline action, but was finally turned down. Some guys really did take a lot of punishment and had the starch to come back willingly for more.
    After going through the few remaining buildings in Le Mesnil Herman, I was ordered to take my platoon around to the left side of town and clear out a pocket of Jerries in an apple orchard.
    Along with some tanks, we made our way to the first hedgerow on the edge of the apple orchard, about two hundred yards beyond the northeast corner of town. These tanks were from the Sixty-sixth Regiment of the Second Armored Division, and we had trained together as a team for breaking through hedgerows.
    Our practice was for the tanks to fire all out at the hedgerow as they advanced, and when they got closeenough they would raise their fire and my platoon would duck under, rush in, and toss grenades over the hedge at any Krauts waiting to ambush the tank. This was the way our attack on the apple orchard began, but for some unknown reason the lead tank did not wait for our grenades but plowed right on through the hedgerow.
    As the tank tilted upward on a small crest of dirt it had plowed ahead the waiting Germans hit it with a panzerfaust in the underbelly. The tank immediately burst into flames but continued to roll on for about thirty yards until it stopped against an apple tree. It was the second of our seventeen tanks to be knocked out by panzerfaust near Le Mesnil Herman.
    The sergeant in command of the tank climbed out of the turret and, with .45 pistol in hand and bleeding from his nose and ears, he charged back at the hole his tank had made in the hedge, and captured the six Germans who had ambushed him and who were by then waiting for the rest of us to come through.
    Without pause, the sergeant then asked for help to get his wounded crew out of the tank. Several of us rushed right out and got two of the crew out, but it was now too hot to go in for the driver and assistant driver. They both were dead anyway, the sergeant said.
    After dragging the two wounded tankers back to our side of the hedge, we yelled for a medic—and the wounded medic himself came up to help. He immediately asked for an ambulance, and so the tank captain got on his radio. One of his half-track ambulances soon arrived and drove right out to the hedge where the wounded lay.
    At this point the rest of us were ordered to fall back one hundred yards to another orchard and take cover with the remaining tanks. The captain thought we were too much of a target and would attract shelling up where we were.
    So we watched from a distance as the ambulance driverand the crippled medic tried to load the wounded tank men onto stretchers and then into the ambulance. The painful wound in the side prevented our heroic medic from bending much or lifting; he couldn’t help the driver, and