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Bill's story rang a bell with me. I have tried to tell folks how things were, and I see Bill has tried too -

"The first time I ever got in one," said Bill, "I didn't know if I could handle it or not. I never did like it, but I handled it. And after you've done it for a while, you get to the point, especially after you've been in combat a few times, where you say, 'Well, I'll never make it anyway, so what the hell's the use of worrying about it.' You live for your next forty-eight hour pass to London.

"There were constant thoughts in my mind," he continued, "For two or three hours on my second mission when I was alone there in the waist and tail, where I had accepted the fact that I wasn't gonna make it - I thought, 'There's just no way you can keep going with that many people after you - they're comin' at you all the time and shooting this airplane - you can see holes everywhere you look ... one of those is gonna hit you."

I figured that either I would live or die. If I lived then I had nothing to worry about at all. If I died, then I would have nothing to worry with, you see, so there was nothing to worry about there either. No worries, see?

Actually I have been in a ward with a bunch of wounded guys, all long termers, between six months and two and a half years in military hospitals. Don't have the faintest why they put a REMF like me in that ward, for sure! Probably a hung over Corpsman or lack of space. Long, slow, and sad, their dying. Those are hard stories.