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PART FOUR: COMPLETING THE JOB


18. Crossing the Rhine: The next event of any consequence was the crossing of the Rhine River. You can read in any history book and discover that the higher powers in our command had been listening to General Montgomery of the British troops, and Montgomery wanted to lory of leading the first troops across the Rhine River. He was slow and methodical in his attacks, unlike the flamboyant General Patton, who moved in great spurts of armor. There were those who were getting tired of waiting for him. Nevertheless, General Eisenhower more or less had to keep him happy, so he was not pushing for our troops to make crossings.

General Patton had a different idea. He, too, wanted the glory of having the first troops across the Rhine River. So the next day, after we had been at the edge of the Rhine, and the events that I just described had taken place, we moved north a little ways near an area called Oppenheim, and it was there that he decided to make a surprise attack across the river.

At about midday, on March the 22nd, all units in the area were informed that the 11th Infantry Regiment, led by Company K, would be crossing the Rhine River shortly after 2200 hours. Of course, that would be 10:00 p.m. They would be supported by about eight field artillery battalions, with 96 artillery pieces, ranging from .105 mm to 8-inch guns and howitzers. The 191, our battalion, would be one of those supporting battalions.

For this operation I was appointed as a liaison officer from the 177th field artillery group, of which 191 was a part, to help coordinate a barrage from all the artillery to proceed with the attack. In the afternoon, therefore, I made my way to the location where this fire direction center was to be, and found that I was going to spend the rest of the afternoon and the night in a wine cellar. With me were all of the liaison officers from the other artillery groups, and we had direct lines not only to the field artillery group headquarters and fire direction center, but also to each of our battalions directly. The plan was for us to coordinate all of the firing, so that at any one given point in time, and on any given geographical location, all of these 96 artillery pieces could bring their power to bear on a particular target.

There were about 200 concentrations of fire that were planned, starting at the far shore of the Rhine, inland about 400 yards. All the roads and trails, as well as five towns on the other side of the Rhine and the surrounding area were included in these attacks. The firing started at 8:30 p.m. At about 10:30, Company K paddled across the river. After they crossed over, we continued firing ahead of them in the bridgehead until about 20 minutes after midnight.

This crossing of the Rhine was significant in many ways, but it was particularly significant to General Patton, because he wanted to be across the Rhine before his old nemesis in the north, General Montgomery of the British, could get across the river. General Patton succeeded on the 22nd of March, and on the morning of the 23rd of March the main attack was made across the Rhine.

On the 24th, the 191, along with other elements of the 4th Armored Division, crossed over the bridge into Germany. In the battles that followed, throughout the rest of March, our battalion began to suffer more casualties. Some lives were lost and a number were injured because of bombing attacks, and also vehicles striking mines. So, in a way, the battalion began to feel more of the pinch of the battle at this point in terms of their losses.

19. Subsequent Actions: Nevertheless, the move kept going. By the 31st of March, we were on an elevated autobahn that was close to the city of Hersfeld. I made my way up onto the autobahn. By the way, the commander of the operation was Col. Creighton Abrams. I wasn't in his presence at the time, but I was aware that he was there, leading it. Just as I got onto the autobahn, we were told that there had been a group of German vehicles carrying a white flag, and an officer identifying himself as the commander of the troops stationed in Hersfeld had come out and surrendered the city to the American troops.

Col. Abrams, we were told, took the surrender. After deciding where they were going to send this commanding officer, who was a general, he then proceeded to send vehicles in to occupy the city.

With those first vehicles into a now surrendered city, there went two vehicles from the 191 FaBn. One of those was the vehicle of a major on our staff, Maj. Harvard P. Smith, the battalion S3. Maj. Smith was one of the original Tennesseans in the battalion, and was the brother of Jean MacArthur, the wife of General Douglas MacArthur.

Maj. Smith entered in his vehicle with his driver, whose name was Wayne D. McLary. With them was one other forward observer and his driver. When they went into the city, which had just been surrendered to them, they found that the troops in the city didn't agree with the general.

They were attacked by German tanks; their vehicles destroyed. They found that, just ahead of them, an American tank had been hit, completely disabled, and the crew killed. As they got out to inspect this American tank, a German tank appeared on the scene and fired on them. They ran into a house that was nearby, jumped into the cellar, ran through the cellar, where there were other people at the time, and jumped out a cellar window, closer to where our troops were. They continued to run all the way through the fields to the autobahn. McLary didn't make it. When I went in shortly after that, I found his body, and he hadn't made it to the building.

After this bit of treachery, it has been reported in the history books, by those who were present at the time, that Col. Abrams was so angry over the fact that the general had supposedly surrendered the city, and then the troops within began to kill our troops, that he gave an order. The order had two words: Pointing to the city he said, "Burn it." The harsh treatment of the city of Hersfeld took place as retribution for their act of treachery. The citizens of the city may not have deserved it, but these are the ways of war.

At this point I want to insert something that's really out of place. I'm doing it partly because I'm going to be getting into some much more serious material, and I just want to get this out of the way before I get into that.

I mentioned the rain, and how terrible it was. I mentioned the fact that as a San Joaquin Valley boy I didn't know how to get around in the snow, but I want to speak again about the snow because there were some things that happened because of that cold and snow up in Luxemburg that points out, again, that I really was very naive where such wintry conditions were concerned.

I remember on one occasion wanting to go from our firing battery position down a long hill to where some of our support people were; our ammunition section, the cooks, and so forth. I simply got in my Jeep and proceeded to drive on a road down the hill. Now, obviously, I had little experience driving on icy roads, and it was about a quarter of a mile from the top to the bottom of this incline. It wasn't a steep hill, but it was an incline. I made my way down that hill, going every direction under the sun. I was by myself in the Jeep. I started spinning around, and I'd go one way and then the other, but managed to stay on the road all the time, until I slid all the way to the bottom of the hill. So that proved that I knew very little about getting around in wintry conditions.

There was an accident that occurred at that very spot, where a tank got away going down the hill and it went off the road and went through a tent. Fortunately, nobody was in the tent, but it went through the tent into an area where troops were. They were fortunate that nobody was killed because of that. So, I guess I wasn't the only one that didn't know how to get around in the cold.

The worst part of the coldness for me was while I was Battery Executive at the gun position. Whenever we arrived at a gun position, I had the responsibility of helping to "lay" the guns.

To do this, it took some surveying by use of what we called an aiming circle. It was a device that we used

(similar to a transit) to set the guns in the general direction of the anticipated firing area. It was kind of a complicated procedure, but I had to adjust an aiming circle. It had two wing nuts on it that were used for securing it in position when you turned two different scales that were a part of it. The body of it was about three inches in diameter, and it had two scales that had to be set. Once each scale was set, I would tighten these wing nuts. When I'd get out of the Jeep and take my aiming circle out to set it up in this terrible cold weather, my hands were always so cold that at times I didn't even find it possible to turn those wing nuts. They weren't frozen, my fingers were just so cold I couldn't manipulate them.

I never found a way of keeping my hands warm. I still have that problem today. It was a serious problem then because I had a difficult time turning them. I finally devised a piece of equipment that I could put over them so that I could turn them. It was one of the problems I ran into because of the very cold weather.

Another occasion proved to be a funny one, but not a very pleasant one to talk about. I was lying down asleep, in the snow, in a trench, with my sleeping bag at the bottom of it. I was asleep in it one night when I had an attack. It wasn't really dysentery, but you get the point that I had to go in a hurry. I knew I couldn't make it all the way to the latrines, and I wanted to get out of our immediate area, so I jumped out. My shoes were off, and the shoes were too frozen for me to get my feet in. I attempted to walk with them partially on, but they came off in the snow.

I was still hurrying through the snow when I heard a very, very weak voice say, "Halt!" I halted and was approached by one of our guards. He said, "Why didn't you answer me?" I said, "I did answer you." He said, "But you didn't answer me until the third time I spoke and I was just about ready to fire." So, needless to say I was having all kinds of troubles trying to live in the snow. That was one of them.

It was kind of funny because the guard was a good friend and he would not have wanted to even scare me, much less endanger me. The reason I didn't answer him was not that I couldn't hear in those days, although it was the experience of the war around the guns that caused my hearing loss. I still could hear then, but the wind was blowing, and it was blowing in such a way that his voice was carried away from me. But I lived through that experience as well.

While we were at that same position in deep snow, as we walked around through it we, naturally, got very wet and bedraggled looking. We had been given, shortly before that, a secret weapon. The secret weapon was a fuse for our artillery shells which was not to be used until we knew that the war was almost over. The reason for that was that if the Germans captured one of the fuses they could duplicate it and use it against us, and it was certainly a deadly weapon. It was a fuse that would do what timed fire used to do. We used to be able to set a clock on a fuse, and hopefully measure it right so that it would travel in time and would go off and burst just above the ground before it arrived. That required a very fine setting, and a very fine determination of the distance and the time of travel of the shell. The new fuse was called a proximity fuse. Its name meant that when it got 70 feet from any object it would then explode, and it would explode forward so that all of the fragments from the shell, and everything it contained, would be scattered out over the ground below it. It was a very deadly shell. I had been told how to use it, and what it was for, but I was told I was not to explain it to the troops, the men at the guns. I just told them to keep those fuses and I'd explain to them later if we had occasion to use them. No one without the need to know was supposed to know about those secret fuses.

While we were at this position, however, while all of us were very bedraggled, I saw coming into the area a lieutenant who was not dressed for war. He was very neatly dressed in a nice, clean, neat uniform, wearing very shiny second lieutenant bars, and I'd never seen him before. I went to meet him, and when I met him he asked if I was in charge of the guns. I said, "Yes." Then he said, "Have you had occasion to use the new fuse yet, or what do you think of it?"

When he said that, it occurred to me that nobody was supposed to be talking about the fuse, and since that was on his mind, I determined immediately that he was one of these German troops that we had heard about that were traveling around in the Luxemburg area in American uniforms.

I pulled my .45 and held him captive, and in my usual fashion seated him on the top of my Jeep and drove him to battalion headquarters where the S2, Lt. Turberville, the intelligence officer, and the battalion commander, Lt. Col.

Goddard began to question him. He was finally able to convince them that he indeed was an American officer, and that he was coming from the ordinance department, which, of course, had put out these fuses. They were interested in knowing how they were being used, and whether they had been used, and what we thought of it. He should have realized that he was running a great risk because we were all rather nervous about the infiltration of German troops in American uniforms, and I still think that it was proper for me to have questioned him as I did.

20. My Brother, Ralph: I want to deal now with some events that occurred in the last month of the war in Europe by calling attention to the 11th, 12th, 13th and 14th of April in 1945, when some unusual things happened in my life, including the death of my brother Ralph, and consequently it was one of the unhappiest and saddest times of my life while I was in Europe.

In order that Ralph will be memorialized a bit in this memoir, I want to first introduce you to him. Ralph was five years older than I, born on October 15th, 1915. The five years difference in age kept us from being together in all of our activities as we were growing up, but we were still a compact family of four, parents and two boys.

Naturally, we had a close association. Ralph died at the age of 29, so there are really few people who have much of a recollection now of Ralph and what he was really like. I want to point out that he had some qualities that I always admired. For one thing, he was a naturally friendly person. When we were traveling together as a family, and he and I were both young people, we could stop for a matter of a minute along the road at a grocery store, service station, or wherever we were, Ralph was quickly into a conversation with anybody who might be standing around. It always amazed the rest of us in the family when he would get back in the car and we would travel on and he would give us practically a life story of every person he had just met. Because of this friendliness, he was liked, and consequently it was characteristic to almost be envious of the way in which he was able to be close to so many people, get to know them so well, and become their friends as well.

The second thing I want to take note of was that while I was studying the violin, and was known for that particular venture into music, Ralph was the singer in our family. He inherited from my mother that ability to carry a tune well, and to do so in a very pleasing voice. In high school Ralph sang in the glee club several years, and was a part of a male quartet that was featured at that time. He really had a very pleasant voice, it was fun to listen to him, and he had a very natural ability in this regard. He never had any voice training, but it was a simple, pleasing quality nevertheless.

There was another musical art that was common in the twenties and thirties and into the forties, and that was whistling. It's almost a lost art today, certainly as a musical form, but at that time there were many professional

whistlers. In fact, one of the big bands, The Ted Weems Orchestra, during the thirties and forties featured a whistler as a part of their regular programming. Ralph was a natural whistler, and his whistle was not shrill or biting, but very pleasant to listen to, and we used to enjoy hearing him whistle many tunes. I, on the other hand, was never able to continue a whistling tune long enough to be musical at all. To this day I find it extremely difficult to whistle. But Ralph, as I said, had a natural ability in this regard.

Ralph was also a very loyal person; in his loyalty to friends, and most certainly as demonstrated by his loyalty to his country. Prior to his entrance into World War II, Ralph had worked for five years at the Lindsay Ripe Olive Company. At the end of that time he had suffered an industrial accident, a fall, that had actually spread his pelvic bones apart. The doctors to which he was sent by the company made no real effort to correct the problem.

They urged him, however, to accept an offer of settlement. It would be considered ludicrous today because it, as I remember, only amounted to a few hundred dollars, but Ralph believed the doctors who told him that that was the best thing to do, or the only thing to do. He accepted the money, but he continued to be in great pain from this condition which was never corrected. Such a physical condition would, of course, have kept him out of the Army if the Army had known that he had the condition.

Ralph volunteered twice at different draft boards. Once they became aware of this and turned him down, and then he went to another one and determined that he would not tell them anything about it. And without them knowing of the condition, he was accepted into the Army. He went to basic training at Camp Roberts, California. While there, this condition became aggravated on a forced march, and at one point he simply passed out. The doctor was not there to weed out those who were unable to be in the Army, so he did nothing about it and Ralph continued, completing his basic training and then being sent overseas to North Africa.

Ralph's desire to be in the service grew out of the fact that I had entered earlier and also because most of his friends were going into the service, and he just felt that it was his responsibility. He would have felt embarrassed and hurt to have been turned down and to miss serving his country. So, even though he was not physically able, he served in the Army as a company clerk, and was went to North Africa, being assigned to a replacement depot near Oran.

He served all his time there until he began to have physical problems that put him in the hospital, where he was found to have tuberculosis. The tuberculosis diagnosis caused him to be returned to the States where he went to Fitzsimmons Hospital in Denver, Colorado for the treatment of the tuberculosis. I was scheduled to go overseas just about that time. Through an incident in which the information about our unit's travel was made known to unauthorized persons, my trip overseas was delayed for 30 days. In that 30 days I had an opportunity to visit Ralph in Denver. It was while I was in Denver visiting Ralph that I met Eleanor, and we know the rest of the story on that part.

In the months up until April of 1945 while I was overseas Ralph was undergoing treatment, surgeries and various other kinds of medical care for tuberculosis, but to no avail. Ralph died on April 11th, 1945. Eleanor had stood in for me in visiting him, and was with him at that time. She wrote to me, and I received the letter probably ten days later. We never knew how long the mail would take to get through. Actually, her letter preceded the official telegram from the war department which came about a week after I had the news from Eleanor.

21. Three Eventful Days: All of that leads up to what I was going to say about the four days in April, beginning with that date, April 11th. Those who read this may come to his or her own opinion as to whether anything mysterious really was involved, or whether just a set of circumstances came together at this time, but it so happens that the day that Ralph died, April 11th, was a day in which I escaped death twice.

For a forward observer who is out on the front line, it's true that all the time that he is with those advanced troops there's always the danger that any day could be the day. On April 11th, two very specific things happened, both of which I have already mentioned, but they happened on that one day, and in either case it became something of a miracle to me that I lived through the experience, and even more miraculous that I did not even sustain an injury.

One of these was the time that another officer was hit by shell fragments. When I left him, I believed him to be mortally wounded. He had been hit by shell fragments from an artillery shell that had hit a tree behind me, and he was in front of me. I could not understand how the fragment had hit him, wounding him so severely, and yet I had not been touched at all. Over and over, while rethinking it, and trying to remember the details, I have come to the same conclusion, that the shell hit the tree behind me and I was in a direct line between the other officer and the tree. I can't explain that.

The other event on the same day, on April 11th, was the one in which I was found being shelled inside a small garage, the garage fell down around me, as I think I've explained before, without my being injured. I then had to run across an open courtyard while the shells continued to fall, and made my way to a shelter, still without being hit. It was against all odds that in either case I would have lived through those experiences. So, in one way, without my knowing on that date anything about my brother's death, that was probably the most critical day of my life in the war, as far as my survival was concerned.

Another event that occurred to all of us happened the day after Ralph's death on April 12th. In Warm Springs, Georgia, at 3:31 in the afternoon, President Franklin D. Roosevelt died. Throughout that day I continued my activities with an infantry company, and you must realize that 3:31 in the afternoon in Georgia was actually more like 11:31 at night where I was, so the word would not have reached me. About midday the next day, as I was proceeding with an infantry company through a very heavily-wooded area, we suddenly came upon about a half a dozen German soldiers who appeared very surprised to have run into us. We took them prisoner.

Since we could not take time to leave the war for a moment to take them to the back, we kept them with us for a little while until we reached a point that we were ready to stop. At that point we had them escorted back to a prisoner of war enclosure.

As we were walking along with these soldiers, six of them I believe, the one who seemed to be in charge wanted to strike up a conversation. It was easy to talk with him because he spoke excellent English. He proceeded to tell me that they were very embarrassed to have been caught. He said they belonged to the intelligence department, and they were supposed to know where we were so that they could have avoided being caught. But there they were, even though they should have known, and they had been captured. He took this in a rather jovial manner. We need to remember that the Germans that we captured that late in the war usually were not saddened by it, they realized they were out of the war, and that they would be safe thereafter in some prisoner of war camp until the end of hostilities.

As we walked along, this soldier turned to me at one point and said, "You must be very upset that your President has died." I looked at him in amazement at what he had said. When it sank in, I said this to him, "You German soldiers don't know your leaders as well as we do. You don't seem to realize that they tell you lies all the time, as they're always putting out some kind of propaganda to mislead everybody, including you. And now you believed them when they told you that President Roosevelt had died.

Don't you think I, an American soldier, would know before you would? And I can assure you that President Roosevelt has not died." He dropped the subject, but sometime the next day, on the 13th, I heard the word, and then it was my turn to be embarrassed. I didn't see him again, so I didn't have to face him on the subject.

In Tom Brokaw's book, which he called "The Greatest Generation," he recounts another event that another soldier remembered about the death of President Roosevelt. He tells a story about Bob Dole, who of course became a congressman and senator from the state of Kansas and was a candidate for President of the United States. All of us had heard the story of his being injured in Italy as a young infantry lieutenant, leading an attack on a German position. I didn't know the date of it, but Bob Dole, in recounting this story to Tom Brokaw, said that he had been scheduled to go on that particular patrol on April the 12th. But on April 12th his unit had received word of President Roosevelt's death. It had been decided by those who were planning the attack not to proceed for that reason, but to observe their loss and wait a day for the attack.

So on April 14th, Bob Dole's squad started their attack on a German position, and in that attack he was very critically injured, injured so badly that he went through life without the use of his right arm, and underwent years of operations and other types of rehabilitation to be able to get back to a somewhat normal life.

Brokaw said that in relating the account Senator Dole raised this question: Had President Roosevelt not died on that particular date, and if they had then proceeded a day earlier with the attack, would it have been possible that perhaps he would not have been injured as he was. Those are questions that those of us who have been in similar situations always wonder about. What if we'd been a day earlier, or a day later, or some other "what if," but those are questions we cannot answer.
 

 

22. Becoming a Battery Commander: Just about that time, or shortly thereafter, I received a call to go back to battalion headquarters. I was asked to leave my forward observer position and become, for a while, an aerial observer, flying in our little Piper Cub liaison plane as an observer. I was not a pilot, of course, because I didn't have that skill.

The pilot whom I flew with was a man whom I always called "Tex" at that time. I'm in contact with him now. He lives in San Antonio, Texas. He spent his life since his retirement there, and he prefers not to be called "Tex." His last name is Pumphrey, so he prefers the nickname "Pump." That's the way I refer to him now.

I was assigned to ride with him. We started out over the lines, looking for targets to fire on. On one occasion I heard a noise that I didn't recognize, but he did. He had been shot down once in another Cub, and injured at the time, and then came back to fly again, so he knew the sound of machine gun bullets going by that little plane. I didn't, and I thought it sounded like someone slowly tearing canvass. But he knew immediately what it was, and before I realized what was happening he had turned over and put us into a dive. We went close to the ground and escaped from that area.

We had been fired on, of course, from the ground, but he quickly got us out of range. That was the only time I remember anything like that happening while we were flying.

We had a funny experience that I want to tell you about. Back at our little landing strip, we had succeeded in finding some potatoes in a field. Pump and I decided that we would have fried potatoes. As we looked at the potatoes, we both wondered together how we were going to fry potatoes because we had no lard or shortening or oil, or anything to use in the frying.

Not far away there was a farmhouse of some kind, so we made our way over there and got the attention of the lady of the house. We couldn't speak enough German to get across to her what we needed, and she spoke absolutely no English. We found our way to the kitchen, and she went with us. We kept asking for something, she kept trying to find things and see if it was this or that or something else. We tried "shortening," and she didn't know that word. We tried "lard," and she didn't know that word. We tried "oil," and she didn't know that word. So we kept snooping around until we found a crockery jar with some meat fat in it. And at once, as we looked at it, we both together said, "Fat," to which she replied, "Oh, fett?"

The pronunciation of the German word was very similar, and had we said "fat," rather than all those other words, she would have known right away what we wanted. She didn't object, and we took some of it and we had our fried potatoes. My failure to react to the sound of the machine gun fire going by the plane was no surprise to Pump. Back in California, when we were in training, I had taken an air observation course from him, so we did some flying together then. On one occasion, on a very hot summer day at Camp Roberts, we were flying bombing runs, so they were called, on our ground troops to teach them what to do in the event airplanes came around to attack them. And for this I had in my lap, in the cockpit, some kind of a box containing many small packages of flour. We would fly low over the guns. I would reach out and try to hit one of them with a bag of flour. Well, I never really succeeded in bombing out a gun with a sack of flour, and I took a lot of ribbing from Pump over that.

While we were flying on one of those very hot days, we were flying close to the ground. He would make his attack just over the tree tops, above the guns, go a little ways further and make a sharp turn, then come back and attack again. I noticed it was a very bumpy ride, but that's all I knew about it. I knew he was a good pilot, and he had control of everything, so I didn't worry.

When we finally landed on the ground at Camp Roberts and rolled to a stop, he took off his harness, his belt, and turned around in his seat. He was seated in front of me. He looked back at me, and I could see that he was sweating profusely. I sat there cool as a cucumber, and he said, "That was pretty scary, wasn't it?" I said, "What was scary?" He looked at me for a while, and then he said, "I give up. You're too ignorant to be scared." And what he meant was that he knew enough about what was happening to realize that several of those times as we made the turns close to the ground that the thermals from the air were causing the plane to bounce around. He thought several times that we were going into the ground. He was absolutely right, I was ignorant of all that, so I was too ignorant to be scared. I'm sure Pump was not at all surprised when I sat through the machine gunning, unaware that anything was really happening.

After the incident with the machine guns, he decided that I should learn to maneuver the plane in the event he would happen to be hit, so that I could get the plane down.

He began, on later jaunts, to teach me a few of the rudiments of flying. We never really got to the point of taking off or landing, and since I could only anticipate taking over in the air and having to land, it was the landing that seemed most important to me. We never got to that point, however, because I was only with him for a few days when I got another call to come back.

Lieutenant Colonel Mack Goddard, the battalion commander, asked me to come and see him. He said, "I've decided to give you command of service battery." Now, I had wanted command of a battery, but I had always expected it to be a firing battery, not the service battery. The CO of the service battery was also the battalion supply officer, the S4, on the colonel's staff. Service battery also had in it the motor maintenance section, so that both supply and maintenance would be a part of that particular command.

I tried to talk him out of that. I told him that I would be happy to be commander of a firing battery, because I'd had all of my experience in that type of unit, and really knew nothing about supply. I pointed out to him that when I joined the battery we were short one officer so I hadn't even served as a battery supply officer.

Now I was to be the battalion supply officer. And as I argued with him, and told him I knew nothing about the job, he said, "Well, that's all right, you'll have good help and they'll soon teach you." He said, "You can talk to Capt. Murphy." He was just leaving the position to be transferred to a higher job. The Colonel said, "He'll tell you what you need to know."

So, I went to Capt. Murphy and I told him what the colonel had said, that he could straighten me out. He said, "You only need to know one thing." He said, "You'll have these supply sergeants coming to you saying, 'We need this and we need that,' and all you say is, 'Yes, I'll work on it. Yes, I'll work on it.' But," he said, "don't do anything until they've asked you about four times. If they make it real tough for you, then you can try to get whatever it is they want."

Well, having been down in the batteries during the time that he was a supply officer, I realized that that's exactly the kind of treatment we had gotten from him. What I did learn from Capt. Murphy was that this was not the way to be a good supply officer.

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